Dispatch #45 - Curated by our Contributing Editors
Read a selection of articles handpicked by our contributing editors from past Dispatches.
Hello and welcome to Translator’s year-end Dispatch, where we look back at a year of reporting from beyond the Anglosphere.
Thank you for being with us on the Translator journey. It’s extraordinary to imagine that we started sending out summaries in February, that our first paper magazine came out in June and our second in November.
Give your friends and family the gift of language and learning about the world beyond the Anglosphere this holiday season!
You can find our magazines, and our super-sized book-carrying tote bag here.
The year in numbers
Since February:
We have sent out 45 Dispatches – for free
We have summarised over 150 articles from over 30 languages from Amharic and Arabic to Turkish and Zulu, from Turkish and Romanian. (The top languages were Italian, Portuguese, Arabic, Spanish and French).
We’ve worked with journalists, writers and translators from around the world
Published our first Read Between the Lines online (by Sanam Maher)
And, our first Guest Edited Dispatch (by Jamie Mackay)
For this special edition, we’ve invited three of our contributing editors to return to one article from a previous Dispatch that has stayed with them. Each has chosen a piece that still feels urgent or revealing. You’ll find the three summaries below, each followed by a short reflection on why these stories are worth revisiting as the year comes to a close.
We have much more in store for you next year, so follow us here or on Instagram to find out more.
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.
For our first Contributing Editor’s selection, a Korean article which caught the eye of Jessie Lau, and which we summarised back in Dispatch 37 in October.
When a city loses its name
Fifteen years after Masan, Jinhae and Changwon were merged into a single “megacity”, residents still grapple with the loss of their local identities and autonomy
“Everything was taken away, even my name.” These are the words of Heo Jeong-do, an architect and longtime resident of Masan, one of the cities alongside Jinhae and Changwon that were merged to form Changwon Special City 15 years ago. He’s one of many interviewed in this recent investigative report by Korean media outlet Hankyoreh 21, showing how a top-down decision that promised unity and modernisation has left lasting wounds.
Heo Jeong-do’s words reflect a sentiment shared widely among residents of the former cities. “It felt like Changwon had simply swallowed up Masan, like a successful company had merged with another,” he tells Hankyoreh 21. The merger erased not only administrative boundaries but also the identities and voices of local residents. Masan and Jinhae lost their names, their governments and their ability to shape their own futures, while Changwon, designated the central hub, benefited from consolidation. Fifteen years on, the region’s chronic decline exposes the human costs of centralised planning and the fragility of local identity.
The first casualties were symbolic yet profound. As the names Masan and Jinhae disappeared from official usage, civic organisations like the Masan YMCA became amongst the few reminders of the city. Promises that city hall would now be located in once-Masan and a unifying symbol built in Jinhae fell flat; both went to old Changwon, leaving residents elsewhere feeling betrayed. Local governance structures were dismantled: Masan and Jinhae became administrative districts without elected mayors or budgets, staffed only by appointees from Changwon. The disappearance of infrastructure – from banks and courts to cultural spaces – followed naturally, hollowing out the downtowns and leaving few reasons for residents or visitors to engage with these areas.
Shin Da-eun and Kim Yang-jin’s reporting for Hankyoreh 21 shows how the merger’s political origins reveal the fragility of democracy in top-down urban planning. The decision was made by politicians, including then-President Lee Myung-bak and local mayors, without a referendum. Leaflets circulated proclaiming that merging was the only path to survival, and the Masan City Council voted in favour despite widespread popular unhappiness. As local political leader Lee Yoon-ki notes, the absence of public participation in such a consequential decision has left residents feeling powerless in its wake. Yet this hasn’t stopped similar proposals in other cities in Korea – Jeonju-Wanju and Daejeon-South Chungcheong – from advancing despite opposition, showing that the voices of ordinary citizens are often secondary in regional planning.
The urban planning rationale behind the mergers was to create metropolitan hubs to prevent young people from leaving – but it isn’t working. Masan’s population is aging; and 20,000 young people moved to Seoul from Gyeongnam Province in 2023 alone. Centralised approaches assume that consolidating resources will mimic Seoul’s “top-tier ecosystem”, but Seoul’s success depends on unique infrastructure, innovation and history that cannot be replicated by mere aggregation. Professor Hwang Jong-gyu of Dongyang University emphasises that local solutions must leverage the unique strengths of each city rather than copying centralist models. For Masan, that could mean developing senior-friendly infrastructure, revitalising local industries and creating spaces that encourage residents to return or stay, a far cry from the current youth-centric, Seoul-focused planning.
In the meantime, Masan’s once-thriving downtown has become a shadow of its former self, with abandoned land, declining commercial spaces and minimal public amenities. Residents such as Park Seung-gyu, CEO of the clothing brand Masanai, cling to symbols of their lost identity, using fashion to preserve and celebrate the city’s legacy. Masan is “rife with resident’s dissatisfaction”, Hankyoreh 21 reports. Local leaders and former city council members call the promises made during the merger to be properly fulfilled; or for re-separation be considered as a means to restore local pride.
The Masan-Changwon-Jinhae case offers a lens into universal questions about governance, identity and urban planning. Cities worldwide face pressures to consolidate for economic efficiency, but at what cost to democracy and social cohesion? The story highlights the tension between centralisation and local autonomy, illustrating how political expediency can erode community trust and long-term sustainability. It challenges assumptions that bigger is always better and shows the human consequences of policies conceived far from the people they affect. “What is the purpose of integration?” the article asks.
The cautionary tale suggests the need for urban transformation to be co-created rather than imposed. Infrastructure is not only about buildings or roads, it is deeply tied to culture, memory and civic pride. Masan’s struggle illustrates that without attention to these elements, even well-intentioned megacity projects can fail, producing economic and social stagnation alongside demographic decline
Jessie Lau on the selection:
As a journalist focused on covering identity and the forces that shape our sense of it, it was fascinating to learn the history of South Korea’s Changwon Special City, a “megacity” created 15 years ago through the merging of three cities: Masan, Jinhae and Changwon. It’s a case study depicting how top-down decision-making that prioritises so-called “modernisation” over local autonomy can lead to the loss of intangible cultural heritage; in this case, a sense of identity and belonging of residents of formerly independent Masan. In addition to bringing us powerful voices from the residents reflecting on this sense of cultural erasure, the piece also tracks the tangible deterioration of local infrastructure and civic organisations, and its impact on community life. It made me reflect on the changes happening in my home city, Hong Kong, and how changes in administration and governance can have lasting consequences on social engagement and local identities.
Original article (“다 빼앗기고 이름까지 먹혔다”…통합 15년, 골병 든 마창진”) by Shin Da-eun and Kim Yang-jin was published in Korean on 11 August 2025.
It is available here.
Hankyoreh 21 is a Korean weekly news magazine that is part of the Hankyoreh Media Group. Known for its high-quality, in-depth and investigative journalism, it covers a wide range of topics with a focus on the economy, politics and social issues in Korea and globally.
Summary by TMH.
Our second Contributing Editor’s selection is chosen by Sanam Maher and is the summary of an Icelandic article from Dispatch 18 in June
The Girl Who Was Called “Everybody’s Property”
Iceland, despite its feminist reputation, systematically fails rape victims, shielding perpetrators and disbelieving survivors
Widely praised as a global leader in gender equality, Iceland consistently tops rankings of the world’s most feminist countries. But an exposé by the Icelandic newspaper Heimildin reveals a grim shadow reality: the nation has long failed its women in confronting sexual violence.
Following a series of Icelandic rape cases over decades, journalist Ingibjörg Dögg Kjartansdóttir reveals a bleak pattern: while victims are scrutinised, disbelieved and dismissed, perpetrators are handled with conspicuous leniency. The story she reveals, culled from her analysis of court records, police reports and public discourse, is disturbing: one where a girl’s reputation can be more relevant than her trauma, and a man’s “spotless past” outweighs the brutality of his actions.
In 1972, a 15-year-old girl, repeatedly raped by a group of boys since she was 13, was the one placed under a moral microscope. Despite detailed accounts of her being stripped, violated and passed around like contraband, the court chose to dwell on her supposed promiscuity. The defendants argued that she “didn’t show much resistance.” The implication? That her trauma was ambiguous, possibly even self-inflicted. The men walked free with suspended sentences, the ruling stating that jail would do them, and society, little good. It was a decision that prioritised the reputations of boys over the violence inflicted on a girl.
As Heimildin reports, the idea of “reputation” as judicial currency lingers ominously through Iceland’s legal history. Before 1940, rape laws explicitly imposed harsher penalties only if the woman had a “good reputation.” Even after the law was supposedly reformed, cultural inertia clung on like a shadow. In a chilling echo decades later, a 36-year-old man who had confessed to raping two girls in Reykjavik avoided pre-trial detention. Why? He was deemed a “family man” with no prior offenses, and therefore, no presumed threat to society. His victims’ broken bodies and fear were not enough to outweigh his societal standing.
A government relatively silent on sexual violence until the 1980s only began to stir when the Women’s List, a feminist political party, forced the conversation into Parliament. Kjartansdóttir writes, “There had been little or no discussion of sexual violence in the Althingi (the Icelandic parliament), until the Women’s List took action in the Althingi and requested an investigation into the handling of rape cases in 1984.” But progress was glacial.
Astonishingly, between 1997 and 2001, out of 224 reported rape cases, only 11 resulted in convictions. One landmark civil suit saw a woman suing both her assailants and the state after police botched the investigation so badly that it was dropped. The men admitted to sex, acknowledged the woman’s fear and couldn’t recall asking her consent. However, their consistency in denying wrongdoing was considered somehow more credible than her trauma. The civil suit resulted in the men paying damages. But they faced no criminal punishment.
Even when digital evidence entered the scene, little changed. In 2014, a teenage girl accused five young men of gang-raping her, one even filming the act and playing it at school. The courts ruled in favour of the accused, citing the girl’s inconsistent testimony. Trauma’s known effects – disorientation, memory fragmentation – were treated not as symptoms of violence but as grounds for disbelief. The boys were acquitted. One of them is quoted in the article saying, “Now we can do what was done there.” He had learned a simple lesson: there would be no consequences.
Today, that lesson holds. In 2024, two women, strangers to each other, allege that they were drugged and raped in eerily similar circumstances, just two weeks apart. The cases appear connected, orchestrated by the same man. Both women endured hours of abuse, yet no suspects have been detained. The police cite due process. They avoid the term “threat to public safety.” Detention, they remind the public, is a serious deprivation of liberty. The irony is blistering.
Meanwhile, victims hide in their homes, fearful and hollowed out. Only a fraction report their assaults, fewer still see justice. Many carry shame so deeply ingrained that they believe the rape was, somehow, their fault. When the law fails them, so too do the institutions meant to protect them. They face not only their attackers but a justice system that treats them as unreliable narrators of their own pain.
The rhetoric from the state is defensive, procedural, Heimildin reports. “We are a country governed by the rule of law,” a former minister of justice tells the newspaper. But in practice, the law bends protectively around the accused while remaining rigid against the violated. A society that still permits girls to be defined by the whispers of their peers and the prejudices of their elders, “a girl who would be of benefit to everyone, both boys and adults”, is not merely unjust, it is dangerous.
Sanam Maher on the selection:
A Dispatch that has stayed with me is from May, titled ‘The Girl Who Was Called “Everybody’s Property”’, originally published in Icelandic in the weekly publication Heimildin. I thought a lot about the view I have of Iceland as a world leader when it comes to gender equality, and this piece, about how rape survivors are punished and their reputations are brought into question while perpetrators are let off the hook, challenges that notion. It’s a piece that didn’t make it onto my radar, even though I’d been doing research around trauma responses and how judicial systems can work against survivors in cases of rape or assault. That’s one of the reasons I’m grateful for a publication like Translator: this piece highlights to me that our world is so small in ways we don’t imagine, and a story that would have been perfectly at home here in Pakistan is playing out on the other side of the world in ways that are so familiar to me.
Original article (“Stúlkan sem var sögð allra gagn”) by Ingibjörg Dögg Kjartansdóttir was first published in Icelandic in Heimildin on 2 May 2025.
It’s available here.
Heimildin is an Icelandic weekly newspaper known for investigative journalism.
Summary by TMH.
Our third and final Contributing Editor’s selection is the choice of Bartolomeo Sala, back from Dispatch 10 in April.
The People vs. Javier Milei
What recent pension clashes reveal about Javier Milei’s political project - and Argentina
When Argentina is discussed in international news, it’s often as an economic basket case. (To what extent this is part of a narrative which explains – or is used to justify – the draconian neoliberal policies pursued by Javier Milei is something you’ll have to judge for yourself, Dear Reader).
Much less talked about is the fact that Argentina is one of few places where social movements and democratic movements from below continue to be a factor in the nation’s politics. (Ni Una Menos—the feminist grassroots movement which originated as a spontaneous protest against gendered violence, and whose greatest win was the approval of state-sanctioned abortion law in 2020—must be the most known and inspiring recent case in point.) An article by Macarena Romero and Diego Murzi with photographs by Nicolás Suárez, entitled ‘Un tiro a la democracia’ (Taking Aim at Democracy), perfectly illustrates this history, bookended by the horrific story of Pablo Grillo, a local photojournalist.
On the one hand, it chronicles the targeted attack on Grillo by the police. It details the way Grillo sustained severe head injuries, and even lost brain mass, from a tear gas projectile shot at him whilst he was covering clashes over pension cuts. It also notes how Grillo was subsequently singled out by the interior minister Patricia “El Pato” Bullrich, scapegoating him as a dangerous “militant”. On the other hand, the piece makes clear how the protests are themselves the expression of a long history of militancia; just as the police repression with which they were met forms part of a historical pattern, coherent with Milei’s stated objective to crack down on any form of dissent.
(Translator notes that not long after these clashes took place, on March 24, the day that Argentinians commemorate the victims of the military dictatorship which ran the country from 1976 to 1983, a video was circulated by the government ramming the point home. In it, right wing ‘intellectual’ Agustín Laje expounded the laughable, historically illiterate thesis according to which state terror which resulted in the disappearance of roughly 30,000 people was a commensurate, justified response to the threat presented by a Peronist, left-wing guerrilla group, the Montoneros.)
By combining the personal narratives of two activist retirees with invaluable additional context, the piece in particular explains the strange alliance of jubilados and hinchas – Argentinian slang for pensioners and football fans – spearheading the protests. The alliance was not simply the result of a common love of Maradona—who, as a defender of the working class, is nonetheless an iconic point of reference both on and off the streets.
Rather, this heterogenous coalition is the result of shared grievances deriving from Milei’s austerity measures, and his disciplinarian attempt to tear apart the fabric of Argentinian society. As the article makes clear, pensioners have long been subject to policies that have eroded their purchasing power in a country plagued by inflation – but Milei’s shock therapy has hit them the hardest. At the same time, football clubs—which in Argentina are still run as non-profit members’ associations and, as such, are one of the main expressions of civil society and democratic governance—have long been under the threat of privatisation. Talks of turning them into private companies ripe for foreign investment have only intensified under Milei. One of his first actions as new president in 2023—as if to announce regime change in the most symbolically charged way possible—was to publicly endorse his political ally, Mauricio Macri who was running in the vote to become the new president of the Boca Juniors sports’ cub on precisely such a promise. (Macri lost to the incumbent, legendary Argentinian number 10 and popular idol Riquelme; Milei was booed by club members when he went to cast his own vote).
The article also details how football fans have been subjected to stricter security measures and police violence in an attempt to curb the power and reach of barras bravas (groups of ultra football fans which have long metastasised into criminal syndicates). And how Bullrich has threatened to extend these measures, including lifelong stadium bans, as a way to scare ordinary football fans away from expressing solidarity with pensioners, delegitimising their political activism as the work of ‘thugs’.
One should be careful not to over-romanticise faraway struggles, but the piece clearly points to how central grassroots organising is to Argentinian democracy, and why Milei might be so adamant about extirpating it in all its forms.
Bartolomeo Sala on the selection:
My two favourite summaries to write were “The People vs. Javier Milei” and “Is another kind of livestock possible?”. The first one because I really got to use all my knowledge and love for the Argentinian context (I even managed to talk about one of my great footballing idols, Juan Román Riquelme) in a way that adds to the story. The second because, I am very interested in the politics of agriculture vis-a-vis climate change, and I thought this one was a deeply researched story of how livestock farming could be done differently, from one of the places where its consequences are most dire and dangerous.
This article, written by Macarena Romero and Diego Muziz, with photographs by Nicolás Suárez, was originally published in Spanish in Revista Anfibia under the title Un Tiro a la Democracia on March 13 2025. You can find the article here.
Macarena Romero is a political scientist and Diego Muniz is a social scientist in Argentina. Nicolás Suárez is a freelance photographer based in Buenos Aires.
Revista Anfibia is an Argentinian digital publication and media platform founded in 2012 in the National University of San Martín, covering all kinds of issues with exuberance and creativity.
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