Re: New spanish sumo bulletin

["G. Jay Walker" <walker@nhrc.navy.mil>]

>Fabulous bulletin (wish I had taken Spanish)! You're already competing favorably (at the very least) with Sumo Now! Get a translator and you will have their business--there might even be a couple of potential customers on this mail list (including me, if the translation you choose is to English).

Let me preface my remarks by saying that I am certainly impressed with the efforts of Leonishiki and his fellow contributors in putting together this bulletin.  Nor is this meant as a criticism of the above remarks.  But I think there should be a little clarification is to what exactly this bulletin is and is not.

When you say that the bulletin is "competing favorably... with Sumo Now!", I wondered if in fact Sumo World was meant.  The layout, design, publication schedule and some of the content in the bulletin are similar to that of Sumo World, while Sumo Now! is a during-basho daily account focusing on descriptions of the individual matches. 

And as Leonishiki stated in his post, a good part of the content in the bulletin consists of information posted and translated from the English mailing list.  Kudos to them for taking the initiative to make this information available to a Spanish-speaking audience and for augmenting this material with their own content.  It is a fabulous effort - very professionally done.  But in terms of original content, it doesn't match that of Sumo World.  And I don't think it is intended to, at least at this point.  Sumo World has the advantage of Tokyo-based correspondents, many of them bilingual, and many of them having closely followed sumo for years.  The bulletin staff has done a wonderful job, but realize that they're not in a position to fully supplant Sumo World (all this is skirting around the issue of will Sumo World ever get its act together) - all they can do is what they're doing - making the best use of the resources they have available.  The bulletin is a success for what!
 it is - now Spanish speakers have a top-notch sumo magazine of their own.  

-George W.