Good sources for articles in English & Spanish?
I have reasonable written Spanish comprehension, but far from perfect. I like to read articles in Spanish, then double-check my interpretation (and look up uncommon words/phrases that I don't understand) in English. I'm having trouble finding sources for such articles, however.
I'd have thought plenty of government-funded international radio stations would be a rich source of such articles, but the ones I've checked (RFI, BBC, I think some others a while ago) seem to manage the different language sections as completely different sites, and don't seem to perform much (if any) direct translation.
One good source of these is whole-website translations; the quality of these is... very variable, tending towards poor to laughably terrible, however. If it's originally written in Spanish, not such a big problem, though annoying since one of the reasons I do this is to check whether I understood the subtleties or not, which will of course be lost in a poor translation. The websites which are translated tend to be big corporates, and reading some executives bio or investor reports gets a bit boring...
Buenos Aires Herlad has "Editorial Spanish" (and Editorial English), though you have to pay for archived content and the Spanish seems heavily anglocized, ut it's a reasonable daily (free) source of this.
So, anyone have any other sources? And does anyone else do this, or is it just me?
EDIT: Should have noted - translated books are a great (probably the best source), but for some reason my reading comprehension of books is far, far lower than say newspaper articles or blog posts - don't know why.
8 Answers
Hi! Try Paulo Coehlo books, they're really easy to understand.
I like the articles here: http://www.muyinteresante.es/
and on www.euronews.eu because you can watch videos and listen to the exact words you're reading as well.
Think Spanish is a great. It's a monthly online magazine written in intermediate to advanced Spanish. In the sidebar are the translations of the more difficult words. You also get audio files of all the articles spoken by native speakers. There is a grammar lesson in each issue, a frequently a recipe following an article about a typical dish. It's a little pricy but I found it worth it for the year I subscribed. I didn't renew my subscription because I was getting bored of the articles, even though I was learning a lot about the traditions, problems, and culture of many Spanish speaking countries. (LOL, after re-reading what I read, maybe I should renew)
I preferred to read the articles on paper, so each month I would print out the whole issue, and download the audio files and put them on my iPod.
reflejos newspaper is perfect
I don't know if this would work or not, but you might try pulling up Wikipedia in Spanish and then in another tab pull up Wikipedia in English and then cllick back and forth between them.
I like to read articles using the website reader on wordchamp. (http://www.wordchamp.com/lingua2/Reader.do) Hold your mouse over a word and it will tell you what it is (and is often able to speak it to you). Click on it and it will add it to a vocabulary list that you can practice in a variety of ways. It's not a direct translation of the whole article, but I find it a much more effective learning tool, even for languages that I know little of.
Hi Kraken, Welcome to the forum! In my experience, this kind of thing is difficult to find. Even newspapers rarely translate articles directly.
Are you at all interested in environmental issues? If so, the FAO has produced a series of "spotlight" articles which are translated sentence-by-sentence into a number of languages, including Spanish.
Here's a sample of titles:
Reconciling livestock and environment
Coping with water scarcity
Brazilian technology for agriculture in Africa
School kids and street food
These are not easy to read, but they can really improve your reading comprehension. Hope this helps...
BBC Mundo is an incredible website for reading articles in Spanish. It is written in relatively beginner Spanish that still should force you to use context clues and perhaps SpanishDict for aid in understanding (I find it a great tool for learning). As far as directly translated news sites go...I'm unsure.
I started to read books in english two month ago. Believe, I have improve my reading comprehension a lot. It is really lower at the first, but keep doing it every day for a couple of hours and you will see the difference in one month.
