Trying to translate

I remember trying to read newspapers in French, and finding that I could read everything except a few key words. At the end of the article I was unsure if the minister opposed or supported the proposed law, or whether the crime report was about jaywalking or bigamy.

I have the same problem with stories in English. Some phrases have no clear meaning, and the whole story depends on them. Like "far right."

Sometimes I can figure out the meaning by tracking down the quotations--one common meaning is "nationalist," which quite a number of reporters and other sloppy thinkers think means Nazi. Sometimes it means somebody who wants to cut back hard on the welfare state. Sometimes it means somebody who wants to decentralize the government. Sometimes I can't find out what the writer means at all.

Given the propensity certain groups have for demanding ideological purity in every detail, sometimes the label gets slapped on a person who disagrees with just one item in the list. A Progressive Democrat who decides that abortion is wrong can get the label.

It's hard enough to figure out American news stories: European uses of the phrase seem disconnected from anything I'm familiar with. There's no way of easily mapping disagreements about personalities in Bavaria into American categories.

How about using categories instead? You'll find some clustering, but the smaller groups will almost certainly not cluster along the same lines as the majority parties.

Nationalism doesn't form a neat spectrum. Some think it the root of all evil. A lot of people are perfectly OK with taking care of me and mine first. Some (e.g. the Nazis) think "me and mine" have the right to dominate the rest.

Ideas about immigration seem likely to correlate with ideas about nationalism.

You'll find a spectrum rather than discrete divisions when asking how much control the central government should have.

Do they hate Jews? These days more folks on the "left" do than on the "right:" it really should be split out as its own category.

Do they advocate for one race against others?

What framework do they support for helping the sick or out-of-work?

And so on. I can understand what those things mean.

Getting clarity won't happen spontaneously. Reporters are comfortable with things as they are, and in my observation not the wisest or smartest folks around. (Good at writing, as a rule.) And who speaks for a group and when? Some groups unite on a few topics but are agnostic on others, and Schmidt will give you a different answer than Fritz. And the press releases and reporter's questions tend to focus on a few of the details, and often controntationally rather than informationally. And politicians won't sit still to answer a long list unless there's some benefit--many don't even answer the 3-4 questions the League of Women Voters asks and publishes.

Probably the nearest we'll get is by collecting the evaluations of a number of different interest groups. I wonder what google translate would do with candidate evaluations from Italian tourism promoters pushing for more money to restore Pompeii? (And which groups are actually independent of the party? It is no trick to find sock puppet groups, and others are long-time close affiliates with parties.)