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In early 2026, Joyce Westner had an idea. What if Winchester’s non-profit, digital newspaper offered translations to its foreign language speakers, especially the members of its Chinese population?
“Because Winchester has a lot of Chinese residents, I realized it would be a good service to that community to publish articles in Mandarin,” Westner said.
She took the idea to the Board of Directors.
“As a co-founder of Winchester News, I have always wanted to make our news as accessible as possible,” said President Tara Hughes. “One way is to avoid a paywall so everyone, regardless of finances, can read the news. Another is to make sure that most of our residents can actually read the news.
“After studying our potential audience we know that about 16% identifies as Asian,” she added. “While that demographic contains people from more than one country and with many languages, we also know that we have an active Chinese community. So we turned to them first to decide what language and how to train the language model.”
In fact, Neilsberg Research in October 2026 estimated Winchester has the highest population of Chinese residents in a small town in Massachusetts, with an estimated 2,479 Chinese residents, or about 4.6% of the community’s total population.
The Census estimates 15.6% of Winchester’s population, or more than 3,600 residents, identify as Asian. That places Winchester 12th statewide, among those communities that identify Asian residents in their population.
The main question for the Winchester News was how to go about making this initiative happen.
Westner tapped resident Wei Han.
“I asked Wei Han if he could figure out how to do it,” she said. “He was so gracious, as he always is, and got it done.”
It also took a bit of help from Shukong Ou, the paper’s tech guru.
“We went to Google’s auto translate to see if it was available,” Ou said. “We experimented with some of the tools.”
Google Translate supports more than 243 languages for translation. But, Ou said, there were some problems with the actual Chinese translation.
“Google Translate is tricky,” he said. “The Chinese part is not that good. You have to upgrade to the next level and hope there’s an improvement. That next level allows people to manually edit the translation.”
The volunteers
Lingrui Jiang is a friend of Han’s. They work for the same company and their kids go to the Chinese language school.
It was the perfect connection in getting Winchester News correctly translated into Mandarin.
After a consult with Winchester News about what the board wanted to do, Han reached out to Jiang.
“I was quite surprised to know that we had this initiative going on,” Jiang said. “I looked at Winchester News and I saw there was a lot of relevant information with no ads. The articles were also very good.”
But it was the idea of turning Winchester News into a newspaper offering translations in other languages, especially Mandarin, that really drew Jiang into the project.
“My parents really care about local news, but they also understand English,” she said. “But here we have the idea of this Chinese version and that would be very helpful to other people in the community who don’t speak English, or very little.”
Jiang’s daughter, Avery, a freshman at Winchester High School, is very involved with helping translate English into Chinese for older Asian residents. In fact, Jiang said, she and other friends have a YouTube channel that brings Chinese residents local news every week.
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But this was different. This, she said, would allow residents to read local news in their native language.
“The first thing we did was to see if everything was actually translating correctly,” Jiang said, adding this was a simple translation of Mandarin.
Google got it right. Sort of.
The problems
Everyone who looked at the Chinese translations — Han, Jiang, Ou — found one huge issue: the way Google translates the word “millions.”
“That one word doesn’t translate,” Jiang said. “We ended up talking to the developers and they just can’t fix it.”
That’s right. Google can’t recognize the word “million” in either Chinese, or in Indian languages that use the 10 lakh numbering system.
“There are a lot of numbers in budget stories, for example,” Jiang said, when it comes to the millions issue. “You have to go in and manually change that.”
But that took a bit of finagling.
“It seems like such a small thing,” she said. “But it is a huge thing, especially when you want people to understand the budget.”
Jiang said there were also times the volunteers would go in, make the manual change and hit save. Only to have entire sections not save.
And, there were times names weren’t correct, especially a company name.
Jiang said it was frustrating: adding and saving and hoping the content was correct or even saving in the browser and seeing some wacky characters where text should be.
“Believe it or not, I actually enjoy all this,” Jiang said, with a laugh. “I like figuring out how to make the numbers work, how to make the editing versus saving problem work. I ended up creating a menu to document words and how they work with the tools we have.”
Ou said the main problem is really Google Translate itself.
“It’s still not fixed,” he said. “They need to fix the problems. There’s a defect with their product. If you can’t read things like [Associated Press] newspaper style and translate it, that’s another defect.”
Thankfully, he said there’s Han and Jiang to make it all work.
Han, however, said he did “very little” with the project. Except he pulled the project together, from an idea to its execution, at times talking to three tech support people to push the translations through.
“I read Winchester news every single day,” he said. “They cover a lot of things and I think it’s great to bring multiple languages to readers. It’s unheard of. I love that Winchester News is the first to make the effort to publish in multiple languages. That means they understand their audience.”
Han added even people who can read in English often prefer to read in their native language and it’s important to recognize that.
“The community is there and the language was a bit of a barrier,” he said. “[Chinese] seniors are very curious about their community. This provides everyone with the means to learn what’s going on in their community. It’s a tremendous impact on the community.”
Hughes said despite all the problems, Winchester News is thrilled to work with all the volunteers to make the multi-language initiative happen.
“So we are excited to work with Wei Han, Lingrui Jiang and her daughter, Avery, to make Google Translate more accurate by teaching the model specific language and word differences,” Hughes said. “It is my hope that more residents will benefit from Winchester News coverage moving forward and that this is the first step to better serving our community as a whole.”
Nell Escobar Coakley has been a journalist for more than 30 years. She is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Gotta Know Medford and editor of Winchester News. She can be reached at editor@winchesternews.org.
