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Andrew HeiskellAndrew Heiskell
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Session:         Page of 824

interesting, the way one says, “I went around the world” and then “I went down to South America”--that's rather typical of the U.S. And we started--we not only broadened the reach of Time, the Time International editions and LIFE International, and started a LIFE en Espanol, the only foreign language magazine. But we tried various joint ventures: in Italy with Mondadori, in Argentina with a fellow by the name of Civita. We got ourselves into TV in Brazil, Argentina, Peru and Venezuela. By and large, none of these efforts were successful. Oh, we also even got into Hong Kong--we owned part of the TV station in Hong Kong and one in Lebanon. That was one of the joys of my job was visiting Lebanon in the good old--in the days when Lebanon was just one of the most beautiful countries in the world.

We soon discovered that the American idiom, the American way of thinking, doesn't translate itself in print, that it's very difficult to run a publication for the Italian people or the French people unless your are Italian or a Frenchman. They think differently; they read differently.

One very early project, before my time, that Henry Luce tried to start was a German version of Time. And you just can't translate Time into German. The words do not come out the same way, the meanings do not come out the same way, and the minds of the Germans have a different receptory quality than the minds of Americans.

Q:

In other words, the concept was always to take one of the publications and literally translate it--





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