Caracas Chronicles

For years and years and years we’ve been hearing the phrase “this post should be in Spanish.” Usually it comes with a side of “if you’re Venezuelan, why do you write in English?” Si no lo entiendes, no te lo voy a explicar. Through the years, we’ve taken different stabs at this. Ages ago, Juan and Quico launched the short-lived Caracas Chronicles en Español site—which never did take off. Years later we founded our beloved Cinco8, which was never intended to be a Caracas Chronicles in Español, but a separate entity with its own voice and editorial line. Athough I must confess that the impulse came from that same need to reach out to our natural Spanish language audience.

As a blog that touches upon anything that happens in the country, our niche and our raison d’être has always been language based—we’ve always valued our small yet influential audience. But the temptation to pierce through the language barrier has always been there: the dopamine high of going viral is nice, however brief.

After wrestling internally between the need to “bring these discussions to a wider audience that really needs to hear this” and “we cannot get distracted from our mission for a few more clicks” we kind of came to a compromise. 

Starting today you will find that some articles will have a Leer en Español button under the byline. Yay. Now you can share that Portuguesa economy piece that will surely piss the hell out of your tío. This doesn’t mean that we have a Spanish language website or that Caracas Chronicles is a multilanguage website. In fact, the insertion of this little button that only adds a shareable Spanish language version is a technological marvel to which the front end result that you see will never be able to do justice to. Here are the basics (por ahora):

• The main language will always be English. Some articles may not be translated and no posts will be exclusively in Spanish. We can take suggestions of which articles from the archive should be translated, feel free to use the comments or social media for that.
• The fact that we added this feature does not mean that Caracas Chronicles social media will now be bilingual. For now, when we tweet a piece, we’ll only subtweet “versión en español.” We’ll see later on if we open new channels.
• Translations may not be exact. Many reasons: style, context, and SECURITY.
• Submissions should keep our original audience in top of mind. If it doesn’t work for Caracas Chronicles in English, we will not consider your inside baseball rant.

That’s it. Help us spread the word, and please don’t start calling us Crónicas de Caracas.