Monitoring the impact of news outside your native language

This article is by Claudia Quinonez, Bloomberg News Product and Bloomberg News Application Specialist Ellen Braitman.

With news breaking around the globe and in dozens of languages, public relations and advertising professionals who work with multinational companies need a way to track news and social media outside their home base.

If communications advisers don’t have a good system to monitor and be alerted to important news outside their native language, they may find themselves scrambling to figure out what was said – and reacting to market impact – instead of driving a clear and planned message.

Consider the oil and gas sector, where some of the biggest stories, such as news about changes in production, come out the Mideast in Arabic or out of Russia in Russian.

The below list of oil and gas companies tracked on the “News Trend” monitor on the Bloomberg Terminal shows news trending in a number of languages. There are often major stories about CNOOC in Chinese, Petrobras in Portugese and Rosneft in Russian (shown here already translated into English).

Bloomberg is able to show news – as well as Twitter – across languages because its reporters write news in languages outside English, including Japanese, Russian and Portuguese; the Bloomberg terminal distributes news from major sources around the globe, including Ha’aretz in Hebrew, Deutsche Press-Agentur in German and Interfax in Russian; and it scrapes websites around the globe.

Bloomberg both publishes some of this content translated into English and offers one-click translation into its users desired languages.

All of this gives a way for public relations professionals to monitor news on a company and, as needed, a list of peers, without concern about where in the world news may break.