Articles and Stories

July 5, 2012

I wasn’t particularly familiar with Pinterest until a couple of months ago, when an artist friend of mine shared the information on Facebook and commented on its benefits to promote his art. I was curious enough to look into it, as I have a couple of side hobbies and wondered if I could share, in a visual manner, what I occasionally like to create.

I found the site particularly fascinating, where great ideas you run into on the web or on Pinterest itself can be “pinned” to one or several digital pinning boards created on your profile; it is a very visual and practical way of finding inspiration about any given project related to decoration, art, cooking or even travelling destinations.

Speaking of travelling destinations, for my “Beautiful Locations” pinning board, I started searching for images of my home town in the Canary Islands and found quite a few, to my surprise, from pinners from those very islands and other parts of Spain. And I say “to my surprise”, not because I don’t regard the Canaries as a beautiful place to visit, but rather because this media site was still relatively new and unknown to many people, even here in the U.S.

Seeing that Pinterest had reached out outside the US, and hearing afterwards that advertisement and marketing agencies had already shown an interest in its potential, I yet again got curious about the efforts of the site to translate its content.  And voilá, there it was, in their blog section. They have already started with Spanish and Portuguese, but they will gradually work on adding French, German, Japanese, Dutch, Italian and many others to the list.

Now, here is some food for thought…With “pinner” being a new use of a word with a different meaning than what you might find in current dictionaries, have you thought about how this will be translated into your language? Would you leave it in English, or would you try to “invent” a word easy to remember by the native speakers of your language by keeping most of the original sounds? Hint: the Spanish blog of Pinterest uses the word “pineador”.