For New York native Will Kern, working at the Taipei Times 15 years ago as a copy editor, page designer and foreign desk editor influenced his decision to start an international news translation service based in Manhattan that serves as a cross-cultural bridge between the US and other countries.
Kern, who used the surname Mittler during his stint at the Taipei Times, says his interest in global affairs started with an internship with the UN as a teenager, where he worked on global environmental challenges. A brief stint at the International Herald Tribune also impacted his decision to launch the service — although the seeds were sewn in Taiwan.
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Photo Courtesy of Will Kern
Kern is now focused on a personal journalism project, the WorldMeets.US Web site, which was set up as an educational non-profit operation.
Since 2005 he has been translating content about the US from newspapers around the globe — Le Monde in Paris, Corriere della Sera in Rome and La Jornada in Mexico — to give Americans a glimpse of how the world sees America.
“My time at the Taipei Times was critical to my career,” he said in an e-mail.
“The Taipei Times was created as a great experiment in Western newspapering in a Chinese-speaking country. Almost the entire editorial staff was drawn from around the world to put out a newspaper that would cover one of [Asia’s] great metropolises in the Western style — and it was a very exciting time for me to be there then.”
In 2002, Kern worked an editorial job for the International Herald Tribune based in Paris. He returned to New York in 2003.
‘TRANS-COPY EDITING’
After his experience abroad, Kern felt he wanted to create a Drudge-like Web site with daily coverage of what the rest of the world thinks of the US.
“That’s how an early version of WorldMeets.US was born,” he said. “But I quickly realized that in order to do this properly, we had to translate huge amounts of content into English.”
It was at this point that Kern came up with the concept of what he calls “trans-copy editing.”
“It’s a system for checking the accuracy of translated copy into multiple languages,” he said.
Kern says his ultimate goal with WorldMeet.US is to create a wave of citizen diplomacy and a global community that promotes peace, cross-cultural understanding and positive relationships between Americans and people of other nations.
Kern is the managing editor of his news service and brings to the site over a decade of experience as a journalist and editor in Taiwan and France.
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