In July 2022, the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University launched a flagship collaborative translation project with Spanish-language news media and the largest general market news outlets in New Jersey called the NJ News Commons Spanish-language Translation News Service (STNS). 

The goal of STNS is to help mitigate the barriers and fill the widening information gap for Latinos in the state based on the Center’s research and coverage needs identified by Spanish-language publications that serve this growing population. This translation service also builds on the Center’s partnership with ethnic and community media across the state to translate important news content over the past six years.

The project is currently in its third year with 14 partners—seven English-language and seven Spanish-language publications in the state. Each week the project manager selects up to five stories originally produced in English and various formats (text, photographs, video, and multimedia) by statewide media partners for translation. Then these translated articles are immediately sent to Spanish-language media outlets that are part of the project for use on their platforms.

The project also creates a weekly recap of all translated and republished stories and shares it with partners on Friday afternoon. 

The Center works with STNS partners to combine resources and ensures that first-hand information—including breaking and in-depth stories or news-that-you-can-use about health, housing, immigration, economy, election, and the environment, among other topics— is accessible and available to Spanish-language news organizations for the greater good of the Latino communities in the state.  

Most Spanish-language news organizations based in New Jersey serve local audiences and often do not have the staff to chase developments coming out of Trenton or statewide breaking news that affects all New Jerseyans. This resource exchange in the form of Spanish translations allows Spanish-language publications to get news to their audiences that they might not otherwise have been able to share.

Nuanced Spanish translations are crucial to mitigate language barriers and narrow information gaps in the Latino immigrant community, from a cultural and linguistic standpoint. As the translation initiative gets off the ground and grows, it will create relationships between the mainstream news partners and the Spanish-language news outlets, relationships that could bear other fruit.