Spanish, as a popular topic, sometimes seems difficult to find anything new to write about. Granted, any language with as many iterations or as much complexity as Spanish should have vast libraries (be they paper or digital) written on the subject. But it is precisely this complexity that seems to provide the difficulty in finding something new to say: the behemoth that is Spanish translation and all its challenges means that here in the localization realm, things can become so globally focused, so panned-out in scope, that we lose sight of the smaller and more specific details that could inform us.

We all know that “neutral Spanish,” if such a thing exists, is better if you’re trying to get away with one Spanish translation of a product manual or mobile application for the entire world, for instance. But what then; how do you get from this truism to real practice? And what if your focus and expertise lies in one specific iteration of Spanish, as it almost certainly will on some level?

Nataly Kelly’s focus, for example, was based around Ecuadorian Spanish, and from this sliver of the Spanish market she has come up with ideas related to the vastness that is Spanish interpretation. Jacques Barreau also considers this vastness and the economics of narrowing it down in his article about Spanish dubbing. Afaf and Yasin Steiert give us a quick look at Spanish translation as a whole within the United States, supported by an informative and somewhat surprising sidebar by Rebecca Ray. Surprising to me, anyway — I was unaware that the US Spanish market provides one of the world’s top economies currently.

Narrowing the focus in another way, Martín Ariano Gahn and Celia Rico Pérez offer some very specific guidelines for improving Spanish machine translation (MT) output.

Elsewhere, Henk Boxma reviews XTM Cloud, Lori Thicke interviews Rubén Rodríguez de la Fuente of PayPal on the different MT engines the company uses, Kate Edwards discusses regional differentiators such as the term America and Terena Bell talks about postmodernism. Later, Laurent Reber looks at business intelligence as it guides the selection of language service providers.

Considering the details that can get lost behind the behemoth in yet another way, Francesc Morelló Garcia offers his remarks on minority language translation in Spanish-speaking countries in the Takeaway.