Moldova Matters în limba română

Announcing, Moldova Matters in Romanian!

Hello Moldova Matters readers! Today I’m really happy to announce that we’ve launched Moldova Matters în limba română (Moldova Matters in Romanian).

You can find it here:

This project has been in the works for some time. When I launched Moldova Matters back in 2021 I considered the newsletter’s primary “value proposition” to be the fact that it was in English. At that time I viewed this newsletter as a nice tool for busy professionals or interested expats to keep an eye on what is going on in Moldova without having to follow the local language news daily. It’s been a crazy 4 years since then and I’ve learned a few things about my readers and what people apparently find valuable about this newsletter:

1. It’s all about email - I was shocked to find that almost all of you, upwards of 95%, read this on email. Almost no one goes to the website and few come in from social (possibly because I’m terrible at social media). Over time I’ve come to understand how valuable people find the email newsletter format.

2. Context is king - Readers tell me often that what sets Moldova Matters apart is that it makes it easy to connect the dots on important events. I try really hard to provide background and color for an event so that people understand why it is (or isn’t) a big deal. Over time I’ve realized that some of this comes from writing analysis or Perspective articles, but mostly its just about organizing the events of the week in such as way as to show the big picture without overwhelming people with details.

3. Perspective matters - I bring a kinda strange background to this newsletter, American living in Moldova for 13+ years, entrepreneur / pub owner, engineer, former volunteer / development worker, current NGO president and advocate for small business. It’s a pretty unusual resume but its allowed me to bring a unique perspective to unfolding events. This has been especially true with the introduction of the Investigations section last year, which has seen numerous crossovers between the American and Moldova political worlds.

While I know you’re all here - at least in part - because this newsletter is in English, it occurred to me that none of those other 3 aspects are necessarily language dependent.

Substack is pretty new in Moldova. Moldova Matters is the biggest Substack newsletter in the country by subscribers (and recently #60 in rising in World Politics) The next biggest is AIM Moldova Business News - the newsletter of the small business association I co-founded. There’s also a great project following local Chisinau news in Romanian, and a graphical project following the Soviet Space Program - but that’s about it.

At the same time, Substack newsletters are taking off in Romania. There are good news outlets there, conspiracy cranks and much more. Bilingual readers of Moldova Matters have often told me that they would like to see content like this in Romanian as well. So, this all got me thinking about how it would work to add a Romanian language option of Moldova Matters.

I started by thinking about using AI for translations but pretty quickly realized how bad an idea that is. It’s not that AI isn’t great at this kinda thing - it really is. But there are *lots* of nuances here. I’m already reading the news in Romanian and Russian (often with the help of Google Translate) and writing the roundups in English. In that process, I take quotes that were originally said in Romanian and translate them to English - having AI translate them right back again sounds like a recipe for disaster.

Also, I make editorial choices about Anglicizing names so that readers who don’t know Romanian might better understand how names sound. Ilan Șor becomes Ilan Shor, Evghenia Guțul becomes Evghenia Gutsul, etc.

All this and more made me go a more traditional route - I’ve hired a Romanian language editor. Her name is Diana Guja and she has an impressive background working as a TV producer, columnist and community manager at Agora. She will coordinate the Romanian content, and I am extremely happy that she agreed to join the team.

How Will This Work? (and where is / could it be going)

In the short term this launch will have almost no effect on your experience of Moldova Matters. Substack doesn’t have a mechanism for running a dual language newsletter, so Moldova Matters în limba română is a totally different page. You won’t suddenly start getting Romanian language content or seeing lots of new people in the comments. In a sense, this is the creation of a parallel website, newsletter and community. Romanian language content will probably lag behind English by up to a day, but otherwise the content will be the same.

That’s phase 1. Moldova Matters is a subscriber supported newsletters - we have no grants or big donors keeping the lights on here. If my theory is right, and people would find this newsletter useful in Romanian, then it will attract new subscribers and continue onwards! Bigger team means more costs so clearly that’s important.

If we are able to prove the viability of Moldova Matters în limba română then I have some big plans to come later. Growing the audience of Romanian language speakers opens up new possibilities for collaborations, guest posts and more content - things that would appear natively in Romanian and then be translated back into English. This means that there is real potential for this move leading to even better quality materials for readers like you!

So… if you know someone who would love to read this newsletter but would prefer reading it in Romanian - share it with them! Maybe you know some Moldovans in the diaspora who would love to keep up with the news in a simple weekly roundup. Maybe you have friends in Romania who are becoming interested in the wild world of Moldovan politics? If so - please share this news with them! Here’s that link again:

Since the beginning, Moldova Matters really has been a community effort. Your subscriptions power this thing for sure, but your emails, comments and shares with friends really bring things to life. We’ll see if this new project takes off (I hope so) - but I know that if it does, it will be because people like you took a moment to share it with a friend. Thank you for reading and for subscribing to Moldova Matters.