Written by: Cassandra McGrath
Photo by: Caroline O'Connor
Rebecca Duke Wiesenberg is a senior Journalism and Anthropology double major who founded the Translation section of the Massachusetts Daily Collegian. Currently, because of Becky’s leadership and the team, the Collegian is the most linguistically diverse college newspaper in the country.
What made you want to start the translation section at the Collegian?
I remember in fall 2017 when the then editor in chief Devyn Giannetti said that we were going to go more digital as a way to become more progressive. I realized then, why not have articles in Chinese and Spanish? What a great opportunity! So I asked my then boss, because I was an assistant news editor, I asked Jackson Cote, what would you think if we had some articles in Spanish and Chinese? He said, “Sure, I don’t see why not. Go ask Devyn.” So I asked Devyn, she said, “Sure, I don’t see why not.” So that's where I got the impetus to start it. There are so many students, faculty and staff on campus who are multilingual, and yes they do a lot of work and a lot of their existence at school is in English because our classes are in English, the language in power here is English but they might prefer a language other than English. They don’t necessarily have to be from out of the country. They could have been born here and have had family here for a long time. And there are also a lot of people on campus who want to learn a language other than English and so why not be the way for people to learn. We’re a newspaper, we already provide people tools to learn, by providing them with the news. That’s why I wanted to start the department.
How has the section grown?
Oh it’s exploded! The first week that I started the department, I started with three languages, because I recruited people either on the street or in my classes. But within three weeks it grew to five or six languages. Then by the end of the year, we were at 10 with probably a little under 20 staff members. Then a year after that, by the end of the 2018-2019 year, we had 10 languages and almost 300 staffers, so it grew significantly. This semester, we have 12 languages and 25 staffers.
Have you translated any articles before? What is your role at the Collegian?
I have translated before. I’ve done a few articles in Spanish, one or two articles in Portuguese and one or two articles in French as well. I also do a lot of recruitment and I run our social media accounts.
Which languages does the Collegian translate into?
Spanish, Chinese, French, Portugues, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, Italian, Russian, Malay, Arabic and German.
Now that you're finishing your senior year, what would you like to see from the translations section in the future?
I would like to see it to continue. It’s already big and fairly established, but I hope it continues to grow so that more people on campus know about it and can connect with it more because we’re made up of students and we are here for students, faculty and staff. I believe it will be fine, it will be in good hands next year. I’m just glad that it exists.
What is your dream job and how do you plan to incorporate language into your next position?
I hope to make the translations department more than a one-off thing. I believe many newspapers should incorporate multilingual journalism. There are news deserts across the country, and I think that a lot of these places with news deserts are places with multilingual communities. Yet, newspapers are still monolingual. They call themselves community newspapers but never expanded upon one specific portion of the community. I would hope to make news more accessible across the country and alleviate the stigma about what it means to be multilingual and broaden the concept of what proper community journalism looks like.