Why did they choose Brazil over Spanish-speaking Latin America?
The New York Times has announced they will be launching a Portuguese-language website in Brazil, with translated as well as original content. That sounds great, and should probably be a good business proposition.
But in the FT article which announced the move, Michael Greenspon, general manager of the company’s news services division, said something with the potential to make 200 million people scratch their heads.
The Times had chosen a Portuguese site over a Spanish-language equivalent, because “the question with Spanish is, which Spanish? Mexico Spanish is different from Spain Spanish,” Mr Greenspon said.
You see, Brazilian Portuguese is MUCH more more different from Portugal Portuguese than any Latin American Spanish is from Spain Spanish. The chasm is so wide that movies or television from Portugal often need subtitles down here (if they ever get here), and that many Brazilians will tell you it is easier for them to understand people from Buenos Aires than people from Lisbon.
Of course, what is quite likely behind his reasoning is that poor little Portugal will be ignored entirely. But the implication that there is no difference between the Portugueses on both sides of the Atlantic is quite clearly wrong. And indeed, just within Brazil, some of the variations in accent and grammar are just as large as those between some Spanish-speaking countries.
If I had to guess what was really behind the decision, it might be something like this:
“Spanish-speaking Latin America and Brazil are markets of roughly the same size, but since the former consists of many countries, it presents a set of logistical challenges. There’s the questions of separate ad teams, legal teams, and indeed, where to set up the base and which style of Spanish to use. For Brazil we can just set up a small team in São Paulo, do Brazil news, and sell ad space for Brazil brands and that’s that.”
And while I’m being pointlessly pedantic – when it comes to the written word, Spain Spanish is not that different from Mexico Spanish. Amongst those that read newspapers often, reading either of the two is not tough for anyone in LatAm. I suspect you’d just set up Mexico City, if you were to do this one day, since it’s the capital of the largest Spanish-speaking country,
