When you work as a journalist you usually deal with a lot of different topics. If you aren’t one of those specialized reporters who cover specific events of a specific subject, then you are one of those who can talk about everything but nothing at the same time.
A friend of ours who studies “International Studies”, a degree that includes courses of different subjects such as politics, economics, or philosophy, once told us that he can talk with anyone for five minutes, but not for more than five minutes. Writing this last fact-check we felt related to this statement. We are journalism students who usually talk about many topics that can go from international geopolitical crises to local events. But the truth is that we are far from being experts on everything.
After finishing this fact-check, both of us agreed that it has been quite difficult to talk about neurology and its related topics. We are not English speakers, our mother tongues are Spanish (Marta) and German (Nicolas), so having to write about what a stroke is or is not, hasn’t been easy. For instance, at the first moment, we even had problems trying to translate the word “stroke” to its correct term in Spanish or German.
“Stroke” is such a general term that we first had to clarify what the Austrian politician was referring to by using this word, because when we looked in a dictionary for the translation to, for example, Spanish, there was more than one option. Moreover, there are many types of strokes that can be caused by many different factors and each of them has a different name, so it made things a little trickier because we were working with expressions that we don’t even understand in our mother tongues.
Nevertheless, the experts we spoke to were fortunately very willing to explain to us what exactly a stroke is, what types there are, which causes can be there, and which concrete stroke was the one that the Austrian politician was referring to. Afterward, the only problem was translating what the experts told us, in our mother tongues, to English, but we did the best we know, and now we might be able to talk about “strokes” for more than five minutes with someone.
RESEARCH | ARTICLE © Marta Vidal and Nicolas Lendl
Blog post for the Cross-national fact check by Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain and University of Applied Sciences for Management and Communication, Vienna, Austria during an Erasmus exchange at AP University College Antwerp, Belgium
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