A year after the release of the English version of The Data Journalism Handbook, we are very pleased to announce that the second translation, into Spanish, has now been released.
The Data Journalism Handbook is a free, open-source book that aims to help journalists use data to improve journalism. It provides inspiring examples from news organizations across the world and a collection of tips and techniques from leading journalists, professors, software developers, and data analysts for how to get started with data journalism.
The translation was produced by our data team in the Argentinean newspaper La Nación. With the summer holiday season in the middle of the translation process, the work took us around five months. We hired an external translator but the data journalism world was new to him, so we held several meetings to polish expressions and adjust vocabulary to a wider Spanish audience.
Gastón Roitberg (senior content editor) and Guadalupe López (social media expert and blogs coordinator) helped with the final editing. We worked with Microsoft Word, Google Docs and Notepad ++. I typed myself the code required, comparing the English version hosted in GitHub with the chapters in Spanish edited in Notepad ++. For the online publishing work in ASCII and Python we received invaluable help from Manuel Aristarán, Knight Mozilla Open News Fellow in our newsroom, to whom we are greatly indebted.
We also translated two illustrations: "The Data Journalism Handbook At A Glance" and the Guardian Datablog workflow - the Datablog's editor, Simon Rogers, provided us with the original Illustrator file and we worked over it.
We believe the handbook is a great resource for the Spanish-speaking community interested in this emerging field. I myself read the entire book many, many times and every time I read it, I discover something new! The diversity of authors sharing their best stories and practices is a permanent inspiration for our work in Argentina. I often find myself saying during our brainstormings, “I think I read something similar in the handbook, let me check!”
Both the original English version and the Spanish translation are freely available online under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, which means that they can be freely downloaded, shared and built upon. The Spanish version of The Data Journalism Handbook can be found at the Interactives section of La Nación website and there will be a permanent banner in our main data section linking to it. The English version can be found at datajournalismhandbook.org.
Three other translations, into Arabic, Chinese and Portuguese, are in progress and will be published later this year. The book has already been translated into Russian.
Florencia Coelho is a New Media Research and Training Manager at La Nación (Argentina) and is an author at La Nación Data blog.
This post originally appeared on DataDrivenJournalism.net and is posted on IJNet with permission under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license. Created by the European Journalism Centre, this data journalism initiative is aimed at enabling more journalists around the world to use data to improve reportage.
Image CC-licensed on Flickr via jwyg.