The Peruvian city of Arequipa has hosted a high-level debate on the (Spanish) language in the media. From the very entertaining report byThe Country-co-organizer of the event- highlighted this provocative phrase from Daniel Pacheco, editor of the Colombian mediaThe Empty Chair, when he talks about tolerating typos: "Perhaps human error will end up being vindicated in the future. It will be the last sign that this text wasn't produced by a machine." I largely agree. Obviously, all of us who dedicate ourselves to putting letters together would prefer them to be the right ones. Sometimes, out of haste or ignorance, we don't manage to do so, and the anger of knowing that this text (if printed) will be forever damaged is mortifying. That's why the media have filters, hoping that a second or third reading by someone else, preferably a professional proofreader, will polish up whatever may have slipped through the net. Now, the combination of increasing pressure for immediacy and the thinning of structures resulting from the crisis in the press leads to a proliferation of typos that is annoying. But that's not what worries me most about the current panorama, no matter how much they sully the result and diminish its merits. The proliferation of absurd news or the homogenization so that we're all permanently looking at what's happening next door are more serious issues. And even if we stick to the strictly linguistic sphere, the impoverishment of writing worries me ten times more than a typo. I hope AI forces us journalists to give our texts more character: this is true emancipation from the machine.
And then there's the envy, of course, of seeing Spanish getting its act together and where there's a lot of debate about Catalan in the media. What language do we want? How do we incorporate young people into journalistic language? How do we fine-tune the balance between genuineness and openness to other languages? These should be very lively issues.
