An investigation into how to make the internet more available for Spanish Speakers
During my time in Chile, a translation error put me in an upper-level history class. I quickly discovered a problem: Wikipedia does not have a lot of information on minor players in Chilean History. While a reader could find out about General San Martin, what about Nicolas de la Cruz y Bahamode? More broadly, the question of how more information may be made available to Spanish speakers and conversely how to package Latin American Culture for Yanquis remains uncertain.
There are three obvious solutions to this problem. First, users can rely on internet translation services. While I was in Chile, I often relied on this service. To be sure we are no longer in the days of Alta Vista Babelfish, which would translate, word for word, regardless of grammar. Modern Google translate can actually get a reader pretty close to the proper meaning. Based originally on translations done of EU documents, the system is able to sort through language to do translations.
Of course, this is inherently imperfect. Google translate is based on translations of EU documents. In Chilean Spanish, the term ser mono, means to be beautiful. However, typed into google translate, the result in English would be to be a monkey. More broadly, there is an inherent unreliability of translation services. If a person were reading a translated article on the history of Puerto Montt Chile, certainly the translator would get the reader to 90% of the way there, but what about the remaining 10% accuracy? And of course, as more and more information becomes available by video, how will translators work to bring videos to speakers of different languages.
A second option might be called the Canadian approach, forcing publishers of work in English to write in Spanish. While this option seems farfetched, it might not be unrealistic. Already, the FCC requires the closed captioning of television shows, how much more work would it be for large publishers, major newspapers, websites to be required to publish in Spanish? Currently, in the United States there are about 10 million hard of hearing (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16177267) but 41 million Spanish Speakers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_language_in_the_United_States) . It stands to reason that an accommodation could be reached for this group.
Ignoring the obvious political problems, this strategy would still fall short for two reasons. First, this could be a huge financial burden. While certainly papers like the New York Times have Spanish Speakers on staff, in the thin-margined world of journalism, this could be a devastating regulation. A second problem would be that this still pushes the readership towards big named sites. Sites like this one would not be able to handle language changes.
A third option might be to set up a group of translators as a form of scholar in residence. This would work by bringing in recent international college graduates or American hispanohablantes and commission them to translate anything they want online for a year. Such a program would allow them to expand the reach of scholarly articles or Buzzfeed in the hopes that they might be able to let the internet, in all its incarnations be read in Spanish. In addition to providing an honest, random sampling of the internet, this might also usher in a development in modern linguistics. One of the current questions in Spanish is whether to translate English internet terms to their literal Spanish equivalent. For example, should the web be referred to as its translation el red? By providing a large database of translated pages, there would be a ready draft of how neologisms are translated.
Moving forward, a serious discussion needs to be had about the next front of internet accessibility. In order to correct for this, there are several ways that major language of the internet can be made available in other languages. Moving forward, it is likely that a combination of approaches will need to be taken.