Over at TPMCafe, Matthew Yglesias notes how difficult it is to find nuanced political commentary on the German elections, written by Germans. I tend to read quite a few political blogs every day, and I must say I haven’t seen any links to German newspapers’ op-eds, let alone to German political bloggers. What little information we can gather is either from news agencies (and pretty much devoid of any perspective) or from American bloggers (usually drawing conclusions based on information from the same mainstream media they’re so used to criticize).
This is certainly not a new or unusual problem. Take our good ole’ Brazil, for instance. If you look for news in English about our current political crisis, you’ll be stuck with Larry Rohter’s rather untrustworthy dispatches for the New York Times. Maybe a more thorough and fitting piece on The Economist. But you’d be hard put to find out what is actually being written in Brazil’s newspapers or magazines.
The idea behind Banana Pundits is to try and gather some of this information (I was gonna say ‘wisdom’, but that may be too strong a word for some of the things we’ll be posting here), and make it available in English. So, our main purpose is to translate articles and news, from sources either interesting or renowned. Yes, it means we’ll post things we disagree with or downright make fun of, as well as that which we thing is coherent or even intelligent.
And while there will be the occasional “personal post” by the authors, it shouldn’t be the rule. We’re here to translate the pundits, not be pundits ourselves. Which is not to say we won’t comment or at least introduce whatever we translate (we don’t expect US readers to know who Ricardo Noblat is, or how influential a journalist he is, for example). In the end, it should turn out like any other political blog, with two peculiarities: 1) it will be Brazil-centric, with original content written by brazilians; and 2) instead of quoting just part of a piece, and linking to the original, we’ll post whole pieces.
We’re aware there may be copyright issues involved in some of the things we translate, as well as the author’s pride. For now, at least, we’ll just carry on and see what comes out of it. It should also be noted that, right now, we are only two translators/bloggers, with jobs and college to worry about, so blogging should be light at this point. We’d be happy to add new members to the crew, and especially happy if eventually some of the pundits would start sending their own translations.
Enough, then. To the hard work. Hope our job may be of some use to someone.
