I'm working on some blog posts about the expected criminalization of sex purchases in Norway. I'm reading a bunch of old articles from Aftenposten and Verdens Gang for background information.
I've been reading Isabella Lund's blog. Maybe "reading" isn't the right word. My Swedish sucks, so I've been doing a lot of staring at words and wondering what they might mean. I understand enough to get the impression that she has interesting things to say, but I'm missing a lot.
That led me to start wondering about a volunteer sex work foreign news service. If you have competence in a language other than English, pick one information source and do a short summary whenever something appears in that source. Translating entire articles probably isn't a good idea, since it probably violates the author's copyright. Also, that much translation is a pain in the ass and may lead to burnout. But a brief synopsis along with a couple of translated quotes under the Fair Use principle would allow those of us who don't speak that language to keep up with that particular information source.
I'm thinking about tracking Aftenposten during the lead up to the sex purchase ban, which will take place in January 2009 if the law is passed as expected. I think Lund's blog would make a good project, since it's written by a Swedish sex worker and reports on relevant news in Scandinavia. If other people take on similar projects in other languages, we'd need a central place to post notices whenever we do a new synopsis. Or Amanda Brooks may want to post the notices with her News Bits posts on the SWOP-East blog. I haven't talked to anyone about this. I'm just throwing it up on the blog to see if I get any response.
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3 comments:
A friend of mine was thinking of doing (or have someone do) a compilation of foreign sex worker news.
Right now, I'm just sticking with whatever comes up in my Google Alerts. That alone takes 30-90 minutes every day to read the articles and do the posting. Subscribing to other news feeds and stuff is beyond my time-budget at the moment. Unfortunately.
But I really encourage you to go down this path. Having an idea of what's going on globally is always a good thing.
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Amanda Brooks
One person doing a compilation of foreign news, even on just one topic, would be a huge job. Aside from all the languages they would have to speak, the compilation takes a lot of time. Oh wait, you already know that. :)
I think I'll set up a separate blog, with a commitment to keeping it going until Norway has committed to or rejected a ban on sex purchases, and the dust has settled enough for the results to be clear. About a year and a half, I think. After that we'll see.
If you don't want to be the central link source on this, then I'll consider opening up the new blog to other authors who have foreign language skills and can do summaries. Or for people who want to do this on their own blogs, I can just post links if they send them to me.
Nothing set in stone at this point, except me doing Norwegian news summaries.
I didn't think about the foreign language angle. Whew!
Please let me know when you get the Norweign blog set up. I'd like to link to it from the SWOP-East blog. (Don't know if I could pull the RSS Feed in through Blogspot or not.)
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Amanda
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