26. LA Times Tests Multilingual Waters

This winter, visitors to the Los Angeles Times Web site will be able to read the Entertainment and Destination LA sections of the paper in Spanish, French, or Japanese, giving many non-English-speakers access to 10 000 event listings—courtesy of real-time translation software provided by Alis Translation Solutions. The knowledge that Johnny Depp's band is playing at El Whisky Nightclub on a given Friday night might not be the greatest boon to Times readers in Madrid or even East LA, but the project's organizers see it as the first small step in the paper's drive to serve its increasingly multicultural community and realize the borderless potential of the Internet.

"As a company, we're certainly committed to reaching Southern California as completely as we can, and we're aware of our global reach as a Web site," says Harry B. Chandler, the Times' director of new business development. Considering that Los Angeles is probably the most multilingual of cities, he says, "when you look at who should be the trial site for Alis' system, the LA Times was obvious."

But some people question the usefulness of such a service. John Esparza, the editor and publisher of Vida en el Valle—a bilingual paper started by the Fresno Bee seven years ago to serve its Latino community (40 percent of the area's population)—has reservations about the reliability of machine translation. Though all the paper's content has to be translated in one direction or the other, Esparza says he hasn't found any translation software accurate enough to actually save time.

He also says that "Latinos might want the Latino angle on the stories," explaining that Vida rarely settles for printing translations of articles from the Fresno Bee. He does think, however, that when the Times prints a story of interest to the Latino community, "it would be great to have that story in Spanish."

Chandler himself admits that by relying on machine translations, the Times will incur a "severe liability with publishing things that could be wrong." That's why the paper is starting with the "less risky" listings sections, which "tend to be more name, address, and time—rather than long, grammatically complex sentences about Clinton's political policies."

"It's a little like reading the menu in a foreign country, where it looks like it was translated into English by a person who doesn't speak the language," he says. "But it's better than no menu at all."

The listings will be of obvious use to both local non-English-speakers and foreign tourists, he says. Which population will make more use of the experimental service won't be determined until it's actually in place, says Chandler, but he adds that the Times would "love to find ways to reach parts of the Hispanic market in a bigger way."

This in itself is a challenge, says Chandler, whose paper is already part owner of La Opinion, Los Angeles' biggest Spanish-language paper. "Millions of people speak Spanish," he says. "Do enough have PCs? Will they read the LA Times?"

Putting aside his own doubts about the level of Internet access among Vida's readership, Esparza says the Times could compete with, or complement, local Spanish-language papers by including bilingual soccer coverage, especially World Cup highlights. Perhaps the sports page, then, is the next logical step for the translation treatment. Chandler speculates, for instance, that local coverage of the Houston Rockets' Yao Ming could spark interest not only in the Chinese-speaking population here but also in China.

If the multilingual features take off in the listings section, Chandler says, human translators may be added to work on more evergreen features. In the meantime, the Alis software will serve each user the page they select in the language they select. Additional languages are planned if the first three go well.

Chandler sees the whole thing as a noble experiment, at the very least. He says urban papers constantly ask themselves, "'How do we serve a multicultural community?' In newsmedia, you can actually try something like this."