Friday, August 25, 2023
maloca
Tuesday, July 25, 2023
panfleteo (Col): (threatening) flyering
In Colombia usually the term panfleteo references the spreading around town or just left in front of certain people's houses of short one page flyers with death threats. To use the term pamphleting or even pamphlet for this does not work well. In English pamphlets are usually in color and folded, at least once but usually as a trifold. I don't see death squads taking the time for this sort of layout and folding! Usually the sorts of things the death threats use in U.S. English we would call a flyer. But just calling this flyering in English would not carry the connotation of death threats, thus my suggestion of adding the term threatening.
This term and the false cognate jumped out at me in this powerful article, which despite this term hiccup I strongly recommend:
Monday, June 12, 2023
junt*s instead of junt@s

I don't think the * solution is common, but I like it. I was reminded of it by the book Junt*s transformamos a Colombia. Not sure how you pronounce it though - as juntes? The e ending has become more and more common since I first posted about it in 2015 (my all time most read post). I like it, but some are insisting on including the a and o as well, so in this case juntos, juntas, y juntes - meaning that e would not capture male and female, but just nonbinary folks. Good grief. I'm fine with just the e for everyone, but if you want to be more inclusive, maybe the * is the ticket. Doubt it will catch on though.
Thursday, April 27, 2023
Comuna 13 (Col): District (comuna) 13
Comuna 13 (Col): District (comuna) 13
This is another one that sometimes gets rendered with the extremely misleading false cognate commune. I wish that everyone held property together in the comunas of Medellin but that is most certainly not the case! You could also use borough for this, but that is such a New York City specific term for large divisions inside a city that I think district is a more global English rendition. You could also keep it as comuna and just add the definition of district the first one or two times it comes up.Comuna 13 is particularly known for Operation Orion, carried out in 2002, where the area was occupied by some 3000 paramilitaries working openly with the army. They were ostensibly seeking FARC guerillas and collaborators but many civilians were disappeared that day. The photo here is from the grassroots work to push for and support the work to find and identify their bodies. There are dramatically more disappeared in Colombia than in any other country of the Americas, and the peace accord established a unit to search for them.
Wednesday, April 12, 2023
caserío: small rural community vs. small village
I have posted about caserío before, and rendered it as small village. But yesterday I was showing my reconciliation seminar students the Basta Ya video about the war in Colombia as part of our study the outputs of truth commissions (as an aside, this video is from 2013 but frustratingly the recent truth commission has not subtitled any of their videos and the few translations I have found of their texts into English have not been done by translators and are chock full of errors). I noticed that in the video they subtitled caserío as small rural community and I think that is not half bad. Village has almost as many connotations as hamlet, the other option. Community is more vague, but that's not always a bad thing.