This week we are starting a translation service into Portuguese for our readers from the growing Brazilian community, making The Martha’s Vineyard Times the first news organization on the Island to serve the community in this way.
Our new Brazilian edition will be available online and we are calling it “O Tempo,” or “The Times” in Portuguese, which is the national language of Brazil. We will also be offering a translation capacity for other languages, such as Spanish and Serbian, for the increasingly diverse community that makes up the Island.
“We need to reach out to the Brazilian community and invite them to be a part of our coverage of issues that directly impact their lives, such as education and housing and climate change,” said The Times’ publisher Charles M. Sennott.
“We also want to celebrate this vibrant Brazilian community and its culture,” Sennott added.
The translation can be found on the website, mvtimes.com, by clicking on any article page and looking for a small icon of an American flag and “EN,” for English. Click on that button and there is a small Brazilian flag with an option for drop down menu for Portuguese, and nine other languages. The translation is a service of GTranslate, which is powered by AI, or artificial intelligence.
The service is far from perfect. We will be looking to you, our readers, for feedback on the translations and how we can make them better. It is clear that AI can be a big part of the future of how newspapers serve their communities, but we believe that is only true if the efforts are driven by human beings who live in the community.
What is clear is that a larger and larger percentage of our community is Brazilian, and we want to serve this part of the Island and open up a dialogue. So how did the Brazilian community start coming to Martha’s Vineyard? Over the last four decades, Brazilians developed a pipeline of immigration that was built upon an earlier wave of Portuguese immigrants that arrived in the 18th and 19th century through the whaling industry and on fishing boats. The Portuguese settled on Cape Cod, bringing with them their language and culture.
Brazilian immigrants have followed in that wake. Brazilians now represent an estimated 20 percent of the Island’s year-round residents, or about 4,000 people. In the schools, a recent survey revealed that more than 30 percent of the students are enrolled in English Language Learning, with the vast majority of them hailing from Brazilian families where Portuguese is spoken in the home.
Too often the Brazilian community has existed largely out of view and has mostly been seen laboring as landscapers, carpenters, and cleaners. But there are also thriving business entrepreneurs and a whole network of professionals in this community. And there is a culture of music, food, and dance that is thriving, as the Times’ shares in the Community section this week. The hope is that the translation service will open a dialogue across the Island so we can all learn more from each other.
“The translation will be great for the Brazilian community. News is everything. If you know what’s happening you can speak up for your people,” said Meiroka Nunes, who runs a cleaning service but also manages a Facebook group called “Brazukada,” which is a lifeline of communication for the Island’s Brazilian community with 11,000 active members.
Nunes added, “It will be good for Brazilians to get involved with American culture because they don’t know what’s going on and this is important because people will educate themselves. And information is power. If you have good information you know where to go, what to do to solve a problem.”
No comments:
Post a Comment