The Linguist

FEATURES 14 The Linguist Vol/61 No/4 2022 thelinguist.uberflip.com Editor in Chief Elvire Camus explains how and why Le Monde launched its English version this spring T he idea of offering Le Monde's journalism to an English-speaking audience isn't new. We have been translating some of our articles for a while now. But we used to do it from time to time and for specific articles, such as major investigations or stories with a global impact. One of the first pieces we translated was our investigation about Le Monde journalists being witnesses to a chemical attack by Bashar al-Assad's forces in Syria, back in 2013. From our opinion section, we translated our editorial about the dangers of Brexit in 2015. That same year, we published two articles in English on the release of 'Swiss Leaks' – an international investigation, undertaken by Le Monde, into a global tax evasion scheme set up by the Swiss subsidiary of HSBC bank. The idea to do more of this, to bring our journalism to a broader audience, has always been there. But we chose to develop our French-language audience first by launching Le Monde Afrique in 2015. Then last year, when our former correspondent in Washington, Gilles Paris, returned from the US, he had the idea of writing a daily column in English about the French presidential election campaign. At the same time, Le Monde in English, as an English version of our French website, was starting to take shape. We managed to launch just a couple days before the election. Attracting a global readership The aim is to reach anyone and everyone who can read English or who doesn't speak French. Quite the goal! When we launched we had little idea as to who and where our readers would be. Today we know a bit more about them: they are mainly located in the US and Europe (particularly the UK, France and Germany, but also Italy, the Netherlands and Northern Europe). But our very first subscriber was located in Japan. We wanted to create a 'mirror site', that is to say the same site as the French one but in English: same stories, same layout, same structure, different language. We publish some hundred articles each day on LeMonde.fr. These come from all our sections and platforms, be it the online news desk, the daily print edition, the magazine (M), our fact-checking desk (Les Décodeurs) or our weekly science section. Having said that, not all of the content is interesting to non-French readers. We won't translate technical articles about French income tax, for example, or reviews of a book that won't be translated into English. Three months after launching the English version, we have also learnt that our readers come to us for the news, so we follow breaking news more closely than we did at the very beginning, with English wires. We don't do any original content except for Gilles Paris's columns, which will end at some point this summer, after the political drama is over. A team in two cities There are four English-native copy editors working daily from Paris and one working from Los Angeles. Their job is mainly to edit the pieces that we get back from translators, making sure there are no mistranslations or gallicisms and that the article is as fluid as it can be in English, working on the headlines and adding a little bit of context when needed (mostly for political pieces). We also have one social media editor who manages our Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts. I am the final member of the team. As editor of the website (rédactrice en chef), I select the articles that we are going to publish in English and the timing of those articles (within a few hours or a few days), send them to the translation agencies we work with and supervise the team of editors. We need a Le Monde journalist to Les news en anglais MOBILE ACCESS Reading Le Monde in English on a phone

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