Sunday, July 24, 2011

Mi pasantía

One thing I have realized I will miss most about leaving Argentina is how much I'm going to miss going to work. My co-workers are great, the Puerto Madero office location is awesome, my projects challenge me and it's fun to accomplish them. In addition to translating a lot of press releases, I've had the opportunity to copy write and do one of my favorite things, make blogs. Here's Entercomm's blog and NetApp's as well.

Last week, one of my work assignments was to find news in Spanish to publish on an agency blog that wanted to share reputable marketing & communications news stories. As a regular reader of AdAge, Mashable, AdWeek and other advertising and social media news, I didn't think this would be that difficult. If these sites are so reputable in the US and share international news, wouldn't they have a way to communicate to Latin America as well?

No. Although LinkedIn profiles are available in Spanish-speaking countries and have specific sites for Argentina and Mexico, they STILL share news in English. LinkedIn usually sends a weekly email of news updates, and my boss showed me how although her account is registered in Spanish, the system does not contain the news in Spanish so they send it to her in English. Way to cater to your community.

In the US, we currently have the perception that having a surplus of news sites and blogs can become useless; we already have enough and are overinformed. But did you ever think about being in a country where you had access to all of those sites…but none were accessible in your first language?

I ended up finding plenty of news written in Spanish and specific to Argentina, but it tended to be more localized. I can't imagine not having a reputable site to search for all of my social media news, where am confident it will always be updated whether Amy Winehouse dies or Google launches Google+. And here in Latin America, they get the news, but often a poor translation of those stories. Mashable launched Mashable en español in 2009, and it failed, presumably because they didn't keep up with the amount of stories and publishing them in Spanish too.

Hence, be thankful for all the news we have in America. And that if you work in the business industry, you don't have to translate every new story that comes out or here a limited perspective because the publication is specific to that country.

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