Sunday, November 15, 2009

vigil to close the School of the Americas


I am headed to the vigil this week! Proud to be part of the largest event against US Empire inside the belly of the beast.

Again we will be providing simultaneous interpretation of the entire outdoor and much of the indoor program into Spanish. We also hope this year to stream some of our interpretation online, and I'll let you know here if and where we get that set up. Wish us luck for getting that working!

If you can't make it this year you can support our work, and this powerful and important movement, by making a donation. We have a slim $1,000 budget for the interpreting, but even covering that is hard, so every bit helps - even $5 would be great, and really, it feels great to know you're a part of this. To do this go to the SOA Watch site and click the donate button on the upper right.

You can also support our team next weekend by doing last minute press release translations into Spanish from home (let me know if you are up for this).

And one last, fabulous, way you could help is with suggestions and clean up of our very old glossary of terms.

Monday, November 9, 2009

la canasta basica


el precio de la canasta basica: the cost of basic nutritional needs (for a family)

NOT the basic basket, or even food basket or shopping basket. Though it is certainly poetic, we just don't say that in English to mean this technical financial thing as it is widely used in Spanish - and given how few people in the North even shop with a basket I doubt people will be able to make that leap and figure it out (though these days I'm proud to say nearly everyone seems to take their own bag in Vancouver). The tricky thing about this term is though it's widely used in Spanish just to refer to the weekly or monthly cost of food, in some countries and instances it technically means the cost of all essential goods (in Mexican government documents for example this includes the cost of condoms), AND services (like electricity). I suppose this could be rendered as just the cost of meeting basic needs.

Sunday, November 8, 2009

people before profit

people before profit: la vida antes del lucro

This is my own invention. I got it from going *really* sideways - or what's it called when you go to a C language? (going sidways is when you look for a similar word in you source language before going to the target) In French this slogan is la vie avant le profit, as I discovered from the video below, by PASC (which has some crazy dark war humor at the end of it). La vida antes del lucro sounds better to me than la gente, and certainly than ganancias. But this is the only place I've found it used in Spanish. What have other folks been using?

Sunday, November 1, 2009

so-called

so-called : mal llamado

Just to clarify last week's post, I am not suggesting that you dramatically change the tenor of a speakers words by adding so-called to therm false positives without clearing that with them. I was assuming an informal movement interpreting scenario where you could either discuss this term beforehand with the speaker or even when it comes up ask, 'se puede decir mal llamado?'. I am a trained court interpreter and much more of a stickler about not adding contextual clues than most doing more community style interpreting - but this particular term of falsos positivos really gets my goat! By using the term as-is we normalize it, letting it do its work as a term - its work against what the believe in: the very dignity of life itself.