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.
reading america
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.
Feb. 9 to Feb.15 Growing up in the 1980s, Pan Wen-li (潘文立) was repeatedly told in elementary school that his family could not have originated in Taipei. At the time, there was a lack of understanding of Pingpu (plains Indigenous) peoples, who had mostly assimilated to Han-Taiwanese society and had no official recognition. Students were required to list their ancestral homes then, and when Pan wrote “Taipei,” his teacher rejected it as impossible. His father, an elder of the Ketagalan-founded Independence Presbyterian Church in Xinbeitou (自立長老會新北投教會), insisted that their family had always lived in the area. But under postwar
In 2012, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) heroically seized residences belonging to the family of former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “purchased with the proceeds of alleged bribes,” the DOJ announcement said. “Alleged” was enough. Strangely, the DOJ remains unmoved by the any of the extensive illegality of the two Leninist authoritarian parties that held power in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Taiwan. If only Chen had run a one-party state that imprisoned, tortured and murdered its opponents, his property would have been completely safe from DOJ action. I must also note two things in the interests of completeness.
Taiwan is especially vulnerable to climate change. The surrounding seas are rising at twice the global rate, extreme heat is becoming a serious problem in the country’s cities, and typhoons are growing less frequent (resulting in droughts) but more destructive. Yet young Taiwanese, according to interviewees who often discuss such issues with this demographic, seldom show signs of climate anxiety, despite their teachers being convinced that humanity has a great deal to worry about. Climate anxiety or eco-anxiety isn’t a psychological disorder recognized by diagnostic manuals, but that doesn’t make it any less real to those who have a chronic and
When Bilahari Kausikan defines Singapore as a small country “whose ability to influence events outside its borders is always limited but never completely non-existent,” we wish we could say the same about Taiwan. In a little book called The Myth of the Asian Century, he demolishes a number of preconceived ideas that shackle Taiwan’s self-confidence in its own agency. Kausikan worked for almost 40 years at Singapore’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, reaching the position of permanent secretary: saying that he knows what he is talking about is an understatement. He was in charge of foreign affairs in a pivotal place in
RSS