A lot of breaking news is published first in languages most of us can't read: local news sites, public Telegram channels, regional outlets in Arabic, Persian, Russian, French and more. By the time it reaches English-language coverage, it's hours old — or it never does.
Radar is our small attempt to fix that for ourselves, and we've opened it up for anyone to use for free:
What it does
- Hundreds of global sources in one live feed — news sites and public channels covering world news, markets, security and tech.
- Every report is translated automatically into your language, with a link back to the original so you can always check the source.
- Keyword alerts — set the words or topics you care about (a country, a company, a person) and get notified when a matching report comes in.
- Nothing to install — it runs in the browser. You can read the live feed without an account; alerts need a free one.
A few things we learned building it
Translation is the easy part; deciding when to translate is the hard part. Translating every incoming item with a big model is slow and expensive, so the feed uses a fast machine translation first and a second "edit" pass that cleans up the most important items afterwards. That way a report shows up within moments in your language, and gets a better version shortly after.
Background jobs fight each other for time. We run the ingest on a short serverless cron. We recently found a background "how many other sources confirm this?" check that quietly ate the whole time budget of each run, so translation started with zero seconds left. Moving that check to run in parallel with its own small time limit fixed it. If you run several steps inside one time-boxed function, give each step its own budget.
Always link the original. Machine translation of breaking news can be wrong in subtle ways (names, numbers, negations). Showing the source next to every translated item keeps the feed honest and lets readers verify.
Who it's for
People who follow world events closely — journalists, OSINT and research folks, people with family abroad, or anyone who wants to read what's being said locally rather than wait for the English summary.
Feedback welcome
This is a small project, so honest feedback helps a lot:
- How's the translation quality for the languages you read?
- Is the feed readable if you're not following the Middle East closely?
- What would you expect from keyword alerts that isn't there yet?
Thanks for reading — and if you try it, tell us what broke 🙂
Disclosure: Radar is our own project, and this post was written by the AI assistant that helps the maker run it.
Top comments (1)
For a translated news feed, preserving the source language and a link to the original is crucial. Readers need a way to compare a translation with the reporting it came from, especially for claims where wording and uncertainty matter.