Lost in translation: a journalist’ journey in Armenia

One of my main goals when joining Birthright was to discover what journalism looks like in Armenia. I wanted to step out of my comfort zone. To learn by doing something different. And discover, I did.

By my second week, my jobsite sent me on a reporting trip to Gegharkunik, a region in eastern Armenia right next to the Azerbaijani border. On the agenda: meetings with local officials and NGOs, visits to border villages, and conversations with residents and refugees from Karabakh.

That’s when I quickly realized the limits of my language skills. Sure, I speak fluent Western Armenian. But Eastern Armenian – the one spoken here – is substantially different. Add in rural dialects sprinkled with Russian words? Let’s just say things got interesting.

There I was, sitting with an elderly couple in a small village. They told me their story: how they met, how they left Baku 33 years ago, their village’s struggles, their views on society… They spoke with that blunt tenderness of people who don’t waste time dressing things up. Problem: despite my best efforts, I understood maybe one word out of four. So, I let others ask the questions. I listened, I recorded, but mostly — I observed. Trying to catch their gestures, their expressions. That night, I listened again to the recording, armed with a dictionary and five open translation tabs on my laptop. I wanted to make sense of their words, retell their story as faithfully as possible.

Then came obstacle 2: talking to politicians.

They love to speak in complicated sentences. Their words twist and turn to avoid direct answers. And me, barely two weeks into the country and despite all my research, I was still figuring out how rural Armenia works, the issues at stake. Add to that a vocabulary limited to kitchen-table Armenian, and you get the picture.

During a press conference with the regional governor, he kept throwing around words likevorokman hamagark (ոռոգման համակարգ), and I was racking my brain trying to figure out what on earth he meant. (Turns out it means “irrigation system” — extremely useful vocabulary for daily life, obviously.) I was taking notes in French — the language I write the fastest — he was speaking Armenian, and the article had to end up in English. Every unknown word got scribbled phonetically in the corner of my notebook. Over the next few days, I turned those notes into a mini-dictionary — hours of recordings translated. By the end of that trip, I had a list of about forty new words. And the list kept growing with every new story.

But beyond expanding my Armenian vocabulary, my Birthright experience gave me something way more valuable: the chance to meet people I never would have crossed paths with otherwise. People with stories that stayed with me long after I left. Trying to keep up with their fast-spoken dialects, scribbling phonetic notes, and nodding wisely while understanding only bits and pieces became part of the adventure. And in the end, against all odds, I wrote one of the stories I’m most proud of.