weblog as translation

November 23, 2005 12:41 PM

EastSouthWestNorth is a breath of fresh air. Looking for Chinese news in English is pretty frustrating. There is Xinhua, the CPC mouthpiece, and it's outlets like the China Daily. The fluffy Beijing Today isn't much better, geared more towards vapid expats. For an interesting take on China from a Chinese perspective, EastSouthNorthWest translates news from independent Chinese sources to give a picture of China inaccessible to the foreign ear. Everything from religious and press freedom to magical man tubers is covered. EastSouthWestNorth previously discussed here, as a much different site.
posted by [expletive deleted] (6 comments total)

guh, should have proofread. its, not it's, and foreign reader, not ear.
posted by [expletive deleted] at 12:44 PM on November 23, 2005

I think one of the things that probably hold more foreign language news translation back is that there's already a business layer in place that handles this for big corporations (for example Sinofile which on the other hand also offers a Chinese news portal called Sinopolis).

Apparently, you can make big money translating local news in non-Western countries and selling the translations to big-oil/tobacco/food/etc.

Who knew?
posted by illovich at 1:13 PM on November 23, 2005

Thanks for the link, Illovich. I didn't know anything about that kind of site. It explains why things like ESWN aren't a more common phenomenon.
posted by [expletive deleted] at 1:17 PM on November 23, 2005

well, they certainly seem to have blogging figured out.
posted by 3.2.3 at 1:30 PM on November 23, 2005

Fighting schoolgirls photoblog? Best of the fucking web.
posted by [expletive deleted] at 1:34 PM on November 23, 2005

Only wish you'd grabbed 100 plus comments. It's such a cracking site - I've long thought it a real unsung hero of the web, sort of an eastern Instapundit (to coin a cliche). Thanks for the post.
posted by Jody Tresidder at 5:08 PM on November 23, 2005