With hiring almost complete for Geo English, a new channel of the Geo Network, Geo’s website sees little improvement on part of it English version. The old verbatim translation from Urdu is gone and replaced by more apprehensible one. There is a flow in the stories now and good use of vocabulary is evident.

Still, the new, somewhat professional way of translation, lack something. Most of the time translated stories do not contain all the information their Urdu counterparts do. It seems the translators or the sub-editors are skipping all the lines they find hard to translate. Thus English readership is not getting full taste of the site.

However, compared with the older version of the English site, the improvement is worthy, if not remarkable. News stories on the old site were hard to read and harder to understand as they usually carry a word for an Urdu word.

The English version can be boosted if it gets stories from the original sources and avoid translations.

The sub-editor/copy editor also need to be taught of—or allowed to do—what their job is. News-story-writing is increasingly becoming an art which uses scientific methods. There are certain styles of writing, including Hour Glass, Five Boxes—used for in-depth articles. Mine favourite is the Hour Glass one; it gives all the important information at the beginning and then elaborates it. It helps the readership a great deal; reader can either choose to look on the intro of the story or study it thoroughly, either way s/he is able to understand what the story is about.