Keeping a Source Text Honest Across Five Languages

A translation note sounds like a small thing to include with a published investigation, but the questions behind it are anything but small. Which language was the story reported in first? Which draft carries the reporter's original phrasing, and which is a careful rendering built afterward? For a joint project spanning five languages, the answer isn't always obvious — and pretending otherwise can quietly mislead readers.

The convention Montrex settled on is straightforward to state and harder to apply consistently: the source text is the version closest to the original reporting, in the language the primary interviews were conducted in. Every other version is a translation, however polished, and is labeled as one along with the name of who prepared it.

When the source shifts mid-project

On one recent project, the lead reporting happened in Hausa, but the first full draft was written directly in English by an editor working from recorded interviews. That created a genuine question: was English now the source, since it held the first complete text, or was Hausa still the source, since it carried the interviews themselves?

The team resolved it by treating the recordings, not the draft, as the anchor. Hausa remained the source language, and the English draft was marked as a translation prepared under editorial supervision rather than a direct rendering — a distinction the translation note spells out so readers understand exactly what they're reading.

A discipline that resists shortcuts

It would be simpler to treat every version as equally authoritative and skip the notation altogether. Montrex's partner newsrooms decided against that early on, after a disagreement over a mistranslated figure in an earlier project caused confusion about which version was correct. The translation note exists specifically so that kind of confusion has a documented answer.

Preparing these notes takes longer than most readers will ever notice. But for the handful who do check them — often other journalists verifying a claim, or researchers citing the work — that extra half day of documentation tends to be exactly what they were looking for.