Dispatch #21
Join us on Thursday, 26 June at the Casa Italiana in London to celebrate the launch of our first print issue.
Hello and welcome to Translator’s twenty-first Dispatch. This week, we’re marking another milestone: the launch of Translator Issue #1.
Why are we doing this – a print magazine of global stories, translated ideas and cross-border journalism – now? Because, as we see it, it’s one of the great paradoxes of our time that, just as the world has become more interlinked than ever, global journalism – the kind that allows us to understand each other better and hold power to account – is under threat from the interconnected forces of economic, technological and political change, and the flattening effect of monolingualism.
At Translator, we believe language should be a bridge, not a barrier. And we wanted to create a space to celebrate that belief: in print, to be enjoyed, to be handed around, to be read at your own pace, in your way. We also hope to build a community around it – for anyone who wants to read the world differently, whether you speak one language or five.
On 26 June, we’re gathering in London to launch our first issue with a special evening at Casa Italiana in Clerkenwell – a space as warm, meaningful and eclectic as the stories we’ve been curating. There’ll be spritzes, cicchetti and, of course, a first look at the magazine.
At the heart of the evening is a conversation on the pressures and possibilities of multilingual reporting in a predominantly English-language media landscape. We’ll be joined by a global cast of journalists, editors and storytellers: award-winning journalist and content creator Sophia Smith Galer; writer and journalist Jessie Lau (one of the editors at the ground-breaking NüVoices magazine); Abdirahim Saeed, open-source investigation editor at BBC News Arabic; and our very own editor, Charles Emmerson.
We’ve asked each of our three panellists to recommend a piece of journalism they admire – work written in another language or published beyond the Anglosphere. You’ll find those selections below, with short summaries from the Translator team.
We hope you enjoy the read and the preview in our magazine, available to pre-order here. It’s our way of celebrating the richness and diversity of language, the people who use its power to describe the world to others, and those who mediate between languages and cultures: translators of all kinds.
For those in and around London, see you at the Casa Italiana on Thursday evening to celebrate our first magazine launch.
P.S.: In the meantime, tell us what you like and dislike, themes you’d like to see explored from the perspective of different linguistic media landscapes. And, as ever, feel free to recommend specific pieces we should summarise for our Dispatches, or translate in full for the magazine.
Here’s what we’re looking for and how to let us know.
Recommended by: Sophia Smith Galer
The Quiet Revolution of Intergenerational Care
How older Spanish hosts and migrant youth are reshaping what ‘home’ means, one shared kitchen at a time
What does it mean to be seen, not as a threat or a burden, but as a housemate, a helper, even a friend? In “Jóvenes y mayores, bien acompañados”, journalist Agus Morales and photographer Anna Surinyach chronicle the lives behind Spain’s quietly transformative foster care programme for unaccompanied migrant youth. Through three interwoven portraits including Moha from Morocco, Musa from Gambia and Ashi from Punjab, we witness how homes once marked by solitude open up to new rhythms and how teenagers once labeled as menas (a cold, stigmatising Spanish acronym for “unaccompanied foreign minors”) begin to forge lives shaped by affection, autonomy and absurdity in equal measure.
Each story captures a fragile intimacy: Moha plays rap from his phone while Lali stirs her vegetable cream; Joana teaches Musa Catalan with a motherly sternness that both frustrates and grounds him; Ashi, once silent, now jokes over chicken curry with Fernando and Beatriz. These relationships, part temporary arrangement, part chosen family, become a defiant alternative to the dehumanising bureaucracy and racism that so often greet young migrants in Spain.
The article doesn’t shy away from the painful systemic gaps: misidentified legal cases, overcrowded youth centres, age determination tests that override valid passports and the racialised suspicion migrants face on the street, in schools and in state institutions. And yet, the focus always returns to the acts of care that transcend those failures – an offer of tea, a lesson in local idiom, a bed shared in trust.
In each vignette, language becomes both barrier and bridge: Joana pushes Musa to speak Catalan so he might better belong, while Kayla, a young Guinean woman, finds in Spanish the vocabulary to name her queerness and claim her right to live beyond obedience. “The keys,” she says, “are like a trophy, from the place I wanted to leave.” That image of something as mundane as keys becoming a symbol of survival echoes throughout the piece.
Morales’s closing question lingers long after the page ends: why have so many narratives about adolescent migrants been told through the lens of hate? This article insists on a different lens: one of companionship. And it’s all the more powerful because it doesn’t romanticise. Co-habitation is messy. Affection doesn’t erase trauma but in the gap between not being wanted by the state and being wanted by someone, somewhere, lies the possibility of a different future.
Original article (“Jóvenes y mayores, bien acompañados”) by Agus Morales, with photography by Anna Surinyach, first published in Spanish on 29 May 2025.
It’s available here.
Revista 5W is a Spanish-language magazine known for its in-depth, narrative journalism and slow-reporting ethos. Founded by a group of journalists and photojournalists in Barcelona, 5W prioritizes global stories told with depth, empathy and visual power. The “5W” refers to the foundational elements of journalism – who, what, when, where, why – signalling their commitment to thorough, human-centred storytelling beyond breaking news cycles.
Summary by ZN
Sophia Smith Galer is an Anglo-Italian journalist, author and content creator based in London. Credited for pioneering TikTok journalism in the UK, Sophia was a reporter at the BBC and VICE News before going independent, creating content for a community of nearly 900k followers. She has won the British Journalism Award for Innovation of the Year, a spot on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list and in 2022 was named by British Vogue as one of the 25 most influential women in the UK. She now works between new and traditional media and this year won the Georgina Henry award for Sophiana, her scriptwriting tool that combines AI with her knowledge base to help journalists make viral videos and combat disinformation. Sophia is a contributing editor at Translator magazine and her next book, How To Kill A Language, will be published next year in the UK and US, charting the global phenomenon of linguicide. She speaks (or, as she prefers to put it, “is endlessly learning”) Spanish, Arabic and Italian.
Recommended by: Jessie Lau
Essay by a Manchu girl in Tibet: Finding My Chinese Identity
A personal essay by a young Manchu woman attending university in Tibet, documenting the experience of being from an ethnic minority background in China
“What does it mean to be Chinese today?” This question shadows over a recent personal essay published by NüVoices, written by a young Manchu girl in Tibet, whose name has been withheld for her safety. Her essay traces the quiet, daily degradations of life as a minority in a state that proclaims unity but demands uniformity. Her writing shares more than grief. She offers a vision: “the day when every nationality, every person, every voice in China is listened to with care and respect.”
That a country of over a billion people houses a constellation of languages and cultures ought to be obvious. Yet this fact remains inconvenient for the story the state prefers to tell. The mainstream narrative is one where Han Chinese dominate, and this Han cultural majority is a state sanctioned imbalance. This essayist’s life is proof of an existence that is becoming increasingly impossible. She hints at the hollowness of state slogans, “56 nationalities, one loving family”, noting that her own story rarely fits within that family portrait.
Even after moving from her native Heilongjiang Province (part of the historical region of Manchuria), to attend university in Tibet, another region acutely charged with political tension, her experience of discrimination did not end. Each weekend while her Han Chinese classmates were free to do as they pleased, she sat through lectures on the Five Marxist viewpoints every weekend. The sheer unjustness of it all fuelled her desire to become an advocate for minority students.
She began to document the experiences of being a student from an ethnic minority background, cataloguing incidents of racial harassment, verbal abuse and discrimination. But her bravery came at a cost. She was put under house arrest for the entire week of the National Day holiday. An experience that led her to harbour a deep sense of betrayal, prompting her to question, “Where do I really belong?”
The deliberate erasure of their narratives from the political sphere make the personal stories of those from minority backgrounds all the more important and powerful. “I believe that each person’s story, especially those from the margins, add a vital, beautiful movement to the symphony of our country.”
Determined to not be silenced, this Manchu girl continues to “call for a China that is done with oppression, where everyone is free to follow their own path”. Writing and other artistic forms become a tool of political emancipation, uplifting the voices of those on the margins.
Original essay (“我的中国身份：在压迫与迷茫中寻找自我”) by an anonymous author was first published in Chinese and English on 13 June 2025.
It’s available here.
The author has been anonymised in regard of her personal safety. The essay has been translated into English by Anne Henochowicz.
NüVoices is an international editorial collective gathering veteran and emerging writers, journalists, translators and artists to celebrate and support the diverse creative work of women and other underrepresented voices/communities working on the subject of China (broadly defined).
Summary by TMH
Jessie Lau is a writer and multi-platform journalist from Hong Kong, now in London. A global affairs reporter with expertise on China and Asia, she covers the intersections of human rights, politics and culture, with a transnational feminist perspective. Her work has appeared in BBC, The Guardian, CNN, The Economist, WIRED, Los Angeles Review of Books and many other publications. She edits at NüVoices, a collective supporting women working on China topics, and holds degrees in History, International Studies and English from the London School of Economics, Peking University and the University of California, Berkeley.
Recommended by: Abdirahim Saeed
Following the Flowers in Yemen
A journalist follows Yemen’s nomadic beekeepers as they hold the pressures of climate, deforestation and war at bay
The thorny Sidr tree, scattered throughout Yemen, is a natural marvel.
Its deep roots protect it from the vagaries of rainfall in even some of the most water-stressed places on earth. Its leaves are used to make disinfectants, shampoo and anti-inflammatories. Its fruit boosts immunity. But for some, it is the Sidr tree’s flowers which form its bounty: feasted on by bees during a short blooming season from mid-September to mid-November, the raw ingredients of a prized honey which can sell for as much as $150 a kilo.
Seasonal migration known as tazeeb has long been the practice of Yemen’s cattle herders. Increasingly it is being adopted by its beekeepers, chasing the bloom cycle of various flowers, moving between the country’s highlands and its interior, transporting hives across difficult landscapes to make the most of the richness of a fragile ecosystem.
Generally, this happens at night – when the beekeepers can be sure the bees have returned home. Sometimes it happens under dramatic circumstances. Maeen al-Najri’s article begins with beekeeper Mosad Al-Humairi watching as a flash flood envelops the truck carrying his hives on their 288-kilometre journey cross country: “for what felt like an eternity, I stood frozen, fearing the loss of half my bees as my three sons scrambled to stabilize the truck.
Despite its risks, tazeeb has become an essential part of Yemeni beekeeping. Al-Humairi inherited 61 hives from his father in 2010. These numbers increased only slowly – regularly decimated by heat and cold – until he began moving from place to place more often, searching out the best conditions for his bees. By 2024, 61 hives had become 97. The agriculture ministry of the Houthi-led government in Sanaa counted an increase of 100,000 hives across the country between 2017 and 2020. Some eighty percent of beekeepers now move their hives seasonally.
It is a precarious business: a reflection of necessity as much as entrepreneurialism. 20-year-old Montaser Al-Harazi explains that he spends his entire day near the beehives, setting up traps to capture any approaching snakes, guarding the bees with a slingshot. “If just one hornet gets inside, it’s a disaster,” he tells Maeen al-Najri: “Not only does it kill many bees, but it can cause the whole colony to flee.”
As in other parts of the world, the use of pesticides represents another risk. There have been clashes between malaria control teams and beekeepers. “Pesticide campaigns cause mass bee deaths”, says the government’s director of livestock resources. In the context of Yemen’s prolonged economic crisis, the cutting down of trees for firewood – even live trees which are later dried out – represents another risk. Sidr forests are shrinking.
Desertification and unpredictable weather patterns force beekeepers into constant movement. “Beekeepers from regions like Shabwa in the south and Tihama in the west have abandoned their original homes”, the official explains, “spending the entire year migrating in search of forage” – not a lifestyle but a livelihood.
Original article (“How an Ancient Yemeni Tradition Is Reviving Bee Populations”) by journalist Maeen Al-Najri and photographer Adel Bishr, first published in English on 7 April 2025, in collaboration with Egab.
It’s available here.
Egab is a bilingual media and mentoring platform that empowers local journalistic voices from the Global South by connecting them with international publications of greater reach. Available in Arabic and English, Egab pairs emerging reporters from over sixty countries with global outlets to co-produce well-researched, solutions-oriented stories – with fair pay, quality and diversity at its core.
One such outlet is Reasons to be Cheerful – a non-profit, English-language online magazine focusing on rigorous, hopeful journalism about the world’s most pressing challenges.
Summary by ML
Abdirahim Saeed is a journalist and editor based in London. He is currently an open-source investigation editor at BBC News Arabic. He specialises in international current affairs, with a focus on the Middle East and North Africa. His reports for the BBC have been published or aired in English and Arabic as well as other BBC World Service languages. Some of his recent investigations covered varied topics, including the humanitarian situation in Gaza, government mismanagement in Libya, racism in Tunisia and the spread of disinformation online. His works have been cited and translated in international media, including in The Guardian, The Register and Arab News.
That’s all for now – we hope you’ve enjoyed the read. Keep an eye out for our next Dispatch of summaries this time next week!
The Translator team