Language Issues in Pro Baseball

Here's a great article on the language gap that exists in some (probably most) Major League clubhouses.

It's an issue I'm interested in since I tried to put together a story on how journalists translate what players say and print it in the papers without explicitly saying (sometimes) that it isn't what a guy said, but a translation. All I found out was that MLB policy is pretty fuzzy—journalists can pretty much translate on their own as long as it's "basically" what the player was trying to get across.

Unfortunately, the players' personality usually gets lost in the process, which is what I was exploring. Sammy Sosa, for example, is a pompous, arrogant person when interviewed in Spanish. But in English he's the humble, simple man who was once a shoeshine boy.

It's all terribly interesting.