The Guardian’s New York newsroom was established in late 2011 with a simple goal: Deliver the Guardian’s news and commentary to our global audience and serve our American readers, roughly a third of that crowd. Along the way, our cross-cultural newsroom has stumbled through an infinite number of quirky misunderstandings: the proper way to say LEGO (it’s never, ever plural), the one true identity of the pound sign — # or £? — and the mysterious dark art of tea making, known only to a select few. “This is quite good" doesn’t mean very good, to the dismay of every single American in the office. English to English is our attempt to chronicle and catalogue our cultural differences, poke fun at our ‘special’ relationship and build a living glossary of news, slang and pop culture terms while we’re at it.As a global brand with millions of readers, The Guardian is a pioneer in fostering cross-cultural relationships amongst its readers. After noticing our readers debating idioms, phrases and cultural translations on social media, we built a bespoke Tumblr site in May 2013 to showcase these conversations. Since then, English to English has grown to a community of over 20,000 Tumblr users -- we are spotlighted by Tumblr in the Culture section -- and we've amassed a following on Twitter under the hashtag #Eng2Eng. We prominently showcase our best Tumblr content on TheGuardian.com, which leads to increased global readership. We receive requests for cross-cultural translations and suggestions for posts nearly every day. Our meetups draw influential media personalities, the New York expat community and even familiar faces from the BBC and the Daily Mail. The next step for this brand is to create more online offerings, connect our readers through meetups and allow this 'mini brand' to integrate itself into legacy Guardian content, like article pages and live blogs. We see huge social potential in bringing the English to English brand onto our site, and we are planning to infuse it into Guardian content that draws the most engaged readers: enhancing culture, sports and lifestyle coverage.
