Growing Together
An initiative to ensure that language barriers do not prevent people from reading good articles in Substack
Growing Together: An initiative to ensure that language barriers do not prevent people from reading good articles in Substack
As small team of writers at Substack, we are developing several initiatives on Substack for the Hispanic community, such as a free Substack directory in Spanish, which has been quite successful (last month we gained over 1,600 net subscribers, for example).
One of our key missions is to ensure that the best content on Substack reaches readers who primarily read in Spanish, without the language barrier being an impediment. To that end, we have been translating more than 100 articles and Notes from English to Spanish for several months, with prior permission from their authors.
💰 How much?
Nothing. We cover everyting.
Authors
This is the list of authors (in no particular order) whose articles we translate on an ongoing base:
Ciler (Newsletter Circle)
Kevin Indig (Growth Memo)
Sahil S (Venture Curator)
We also can translate articles and/or Notes less often from:
📆 Further Steps
In a further step, we are launching this initiative on Substack, with the aim of benefiting those readers and also the authors who write in English.
For English-speaking authors interested in participating (it's free), we would take care of:
Make a comment or translate into Spanish 1-3 significant paragraphs from each of the articles (if they do not have a hard paywall, of course), or each of the articles from a only 1 section, which we would restack. In other words, we would restack all (or the section) of the articles with a comment (in Spanish) and a link and image of such articles. This creates a Note about their articles.
We would include the text of that Note (with a link) in a newsletter that we send to our subscribers. One of our team members, Mercedes de Santiago, was already doing this in English and Spanish, and we are merging her publication with ours. This is a sample of our daily we produce with articles in Spanish. We will produce some weekly newsletter by topics.
We would also embed such notes in an appropriate guide or article from one of our publications (we have more than 20), as a good example of the topic being discussed in that text. This way, if our readers want to know more, they can go to the full article, which is in their newsletters.
In addition, if we find any of the Notes of participating authors that we consider particularly valuable, we can translate them into Spanish with a link to their profile, their Notes, and a description of what they write, which we would also embed in our publications. We have already done this with dozens of Notes.
📚 By reading such articles and comparing them, we can also offer them a free translation into Spanish of the best article of the year written in English in the Library (more information here). All articles in the Library will be restacked more than once, by some of a long list of writers who agree.
🔊 By including their article in this library, participating authors can increase their visibility, attract potential partners, supporters, donors, and volunteers, and connect with like-minded people who share their vision. Our simple process ensures that getting listed in the repository is quick, free and easy. And, starting this year, the best articles in each category will receive a cash prize.
🎬 And what do they have to do? We just ask that the authors restack the Note commenting on their articles, nothing else. The goal is for more people, regardless of their language, to see how we try to overcome the language barrier on Substack. In addition, it is quite common for authors to restack notes that restack their own articles.
This is the first list of participants (in no particular order):