Globish

Globish is a neologism for global English and it is a generally difficult to fully achieve holy grail, much like what tends to be called neutral Spanish rather than global Spanish. Neutral Spanish is one that avoids terms used only in some countries or understood differently across countries, such as la guagua for the bus or the many country specific terms for white person. The term Globish is often used broadly to refer to English that is more accessible to L2, L3, L4 speakers (those who speak English as a second, third, fourth language). Though technically Globish only refers to, as wikipedia puts it, "a subset of the English language formalized in 2004 by Jean-Paul Nerrière. It uses a subset of standard English grammar and a list of 1500 English words." It points to how much of English use around the world is between non-native English speakers. The chart documenting this here (only 4% of English use is between native speakers!) is from this article about Globish.

Nos queremos - vivas

This fabulous slogan, widely used by the feminist movement across Latin America, has a fabulous double meaning of both we want to be - alive and we love ourselves - alive. I haven't figured out a way to convey both of those in English. If I had to choose between the two while interpreting, I would choose the later - but in a translation I might try to squeeze them both in or do a translator's note. This coverage of International Women's Day this year (lots of fabulous photos, worth a look) got me thinking of it. They translated it, with this photo, as just we want to be alive.

plataforma: coalition not platform

plataforma: coalition not platform

In Colombia right now there are a lot of 'plataformas de paz' and I keep seeing this rendered in English as peace platforms. Please stop! That's a super confusing false cognate. In US English at least a platform is what a candidate or a party runs for office on. It is most certainly not a coalition of grassroots groups coming together to work for something, like peace. I highly doubt platform would work in British English either, but if you want it to be understandable in both, avoid it and use coalition instead. 

Asistentes al segundo congreso de la plataforma Lgbti por la Paz en Colombia

prison industrial complex: complejo industrial de prisiones

prison industrial complex: complejo industrial de prisiones 

This one does not have great googlage, but I think it works well. Not super tricky, just one I hadn't really thought of before. I ran into it in this article:

Género, cuerpo, racismo y complejo industrial de prisiones: experiencias de personas negras en una cárcel de Bogotá 

por Jei Alanis Bello Ramírez

hashtivism: hashtivismo

The English wiktionary entry for this says it is a derogatory term, but I have seen it used without any
derogatory intent. Yes, you could call it hashtag activism - but doesn't hashtivism sound cooler?!

Hashtivismo only has 327 hits on google but I like it. Yes, you could say activismo hashtag, but again, doesn't hashtivismo sound cooler?

Is it still hashtivism when it both comes from and then again leaps offline, like #metoo did? Hell yes, hashtivism can be part of a larger campaign.

proyectos productivos (Col): (usually small-scale) entrepreneurial ventures

I have been endlessly frustrated by seeing this term rendered as the false cognate productive projects. That rendition just won't mean much to English only speakers. I can stand 'income generating projects', which I sometimes see, but I stumbled on this better rendition in the article:

Counter, Max. “‘La Doble Condición ’: Landmine Victims, Forced Displacement, and Disability in Colombia’s Magdalena Medio.” Social & Cultural Geography 19, no. 4 (May 19, 2018): 448–72. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2017.1280616.

Max rendered it at first as small-scale, and then later adds the usually. In a simultaneous interpreting scenario I would add that qualification the first time and then just use entrepreneurial ventures to be able to keep up, since the term will surely be repeated if it is an event about peacebuilding in Colombia.

I would note that many of these entrepreneurial ventures by former FARC combatants are not small scale at all, but rather large scale coops - making everything from honey to bags to, my favorite, 'la roja' beer (see photo). 

el rebusque: the hustle for odd jobs/gigs.

I was reminded of the difficulty of translating this term by reading the article

Alves, Jaime Amparo. “‘Esa Paz Blanca, Esa Paz de Muerte’: Peacetime, Wartime, and Black Impossible Chronos in Postconflict Colombia.” The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 24, no. 3 (November 2019): 653–71. https://doi.org/10.1111/jlca.12424.

 

It's fantastic and if you don't have access to it email me if you want a copy. Jaime just uses the term odd jobs for rebusque and gives examples (street vending, cleaning, repairing). I like the term odd jobs but I think it leaves out the constant stress and search and finding them that the term rebusque points to, which is why I include the hustle part. People will often say 'esta en el rebusque', which I would render as 'he's on the hustle for odd jobs'. Sometimes I'll say hustling for gigs. Note that the term hustling alone could be misread as looking for sex work! You could also render this as 'scrambling to support yourself any way possible'. I would include Uber driving and meal delivery as el rebusque. Really the gig economy es la economía del rebusque.

hacer presencia/acto de presencia: make an appearance.

This is most certainly NOT to "make a presence" (as I saw here - one of a great collection of essays by anthropologists about the implementation of the Colombian peace accord four years in, all here). But what exactly is it? Acto de presencia is from legalese, where it means to formally appear in court, or appear in the court record. But this term is widely used outside of legal settings. I myself have often used it to refer to when I need to show up at a friend's event or party even just briefly, to show I care and to stay in good graces, but I plan to leave fairly quickly - or even if I stay it's not so much that I really want to be there but I go out of a sense of obligation and because my absence will be noted. In English we talk about that as making an appearance. In the article by Erin McFee that got me thinking about this term she tells a story of representatives of state agencies haciendo presencia at a 'reconciliation fair.' She connects these performances to ideas of historic absence of and now an attempt at presence by the Colombian state - so perhaps poetically the awkward translation of 'make a presence' helps her make her point, but in everyday English it sounds wrong - particularly because making an appearance is a common expression.

sanism: cuerdismo

sanism: cuerdismo

According to the urban dictionary "The social, legal, or institutional discrimination against individuals who are mentally ill/neurodivergent, or who may be considered "not sane" by society's standards. This can often cross over into ableism." (translation of ableism here)

Thanks to my stepmom Helen for checking me on my past over-frequent use of the adjective crazy. Often bizarre is a good replacement and better captures what I'm trying to say.

Many thanks again to Andrea Parra for this translation.

CAI (Bogotá): police kiosk

CAI stands for comando de accion imediata, but that won't mean anything to readers if you translate literally. They are actually tiny police kiosks around the city, usually just one room buildings standing in parks and plazas. I saw this rendition in the Guardian coverage of the protests the last two nights. If you haven't been reading and sharing news about the protests, please do. An international response could help. See my twitter feed @spaceforpeace for more.

My favorite response to the CAI burning was this:

swords into ploughshares: espadas en rejas de arado

Having grown up as (and still practicing as) a silent Quaker I don't know much religious terminology in either language. I don't expect that I ever will but there are a few biblical turns of phrase that often come up in social justice work that seem worth knowing. This one comes from:

They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. (Isaiah 2:4).

Forjarán sus espadas en rejas de arado, y sus lanzas en podaderas. No alzará espada nación contra nación, ni se adiestrarán más para la guerra.

Of course there are LOTS of different versions of the bible.  Check out the many versions of just this verse here. Some of those use just espadas en arados - swords into ploughs. I certainly think that is clearer and makes more sense - but I don't think it's what people are used to hearing, in either language. 

But then again, maybe people are getting more used to more updated versions - such as these used by Days of Prayer and Action for Colombia:

more zoom simul tips

In my last post about simultaneous interpreting on zoom I said that it cost $200 a month for the interpreting channel. That was wrong. Many thanks to Ron Garcia-Fogarty and the spectacular tilde language justice cooperative for explaining how it can be done for $55 a month (and less if shared). As he explained it:

"It works like this: Zoom Pro is $15/month or $150/year, and the webinar add-on is an additional $40/month or $400/year. It's listed (not very clearly) as the first bullet point in pre-requisites on their website. So anyone who already has Pro, just needs to purchase the webinar add-on to have access to zoom with interpretation. And what we do is we pass along that cost to clients who want to be able to use it, by charging $25 per use for short meetings or $50 per day for longer events."

Ron also very generously shared handouts that tilde uses to make video simul work better, which I have taken way too long to post. These include visual, verbal, and chatbox text instructions for participants, checklists for interps and for tech support, and more. You can find them here.

If anyone has any other suggestions or or resources I would love to share them here.

whiteness: blanquedad or blanquitud?

I have been using blanquedad, but recently I've been seeing blanquitud more often. So I did a google hits check, a trick that I often use when translating (or when I'm serving as the backup interpreter) and considering different options. It turns out that blanquedad only has 7,280 hits while blanquitud has 91,500. The hits on blanquedad are decent sources (sometimes they will all be clearly translations using false cognates) but still, I am going to shift to blanquitud since it is more widely used online. Thoughts? Comments?

These thoughts brought to you thanks to the article below, which is based on the Latin American wide PERLA survey that uses the color palette I mentioned a few weeks ago in the black and brown post. If you are interested in reading it and don't have access just ask me for a copy. 

Vásquez-Padilla, Darío Hernán, and Castriela Esther Hernández-Reyes. “Interrogando la gramática racial de la blanquitud: Hacia una analítica del blanqueamiento en el orden racial colombiano.” Latin American Research Review 55, no. 1 (March 19, 2020): 64–80. https://doi.org/10.25222/larr.170.

zoom simul tips

I recently did my first zoom simultaneous interpreting gig. Some of the ways we set it up might be useful for you. First let me say I realize that not a lot of groups can pay $200 a month for zoom pro to have the interpreter channel in zoom, so I know many are doing the workaround of having the source language on zoom and the target language on jitsi or skype. I'm not going to speak to the tech of that here, but want to point to the extra challenge that poses. If you are doing simultaneous 'terping in a zoom interpretation channel with a colleague these tricks might help.

Because this was a webinar with an active chat channel where our comments would get lost even if we directed them to each other, the interpretation team (me, my colleague, our terp tech support person) opened a google chat and had it running on the side of our screen. We all muted that tab on our browser so that texts would not ding.

I tried to mute all things around me that ever ding and go off on my computer and around me. I managed to miss my iPad though - so really think that one through!

Our tech support person helped me make sure I didn't have my ceiling fan or distracting wall notes in my frame. 

I logged in to the event as a panelist on my desktop, which was where I interpreted. I just used my built-in desktop mike which worked fine. I logged in again as an audience member on my laptop so that I could listen to my colleague during his stints. I had large headphones that I used for the desktop and little earbuds for the laptop. While my colleague was interpreting I had one earbud in one ear and the headphones in the other ear so that I could hear both his interpreting and the source language. If there was a difficult term I fed it to him in the google chat. I also used this to note how he was rendering certain terms so that I could keep them consistent when we switched.

We switched every 15 minutes. Whoever was backup would have their camera off (and obviously be muted). The backup terp was responsible for keeping track of time and when it hit 15 would turn their camera back on. The working terp would then wait until the end of a thought or phrase and wave and point to let the backup terp know to keep going. They would then turn their camera off.

We were interpreting for a presentation by Valarie Kaur to the Friends General Conference. I was so inspired by her and deeply honored to get to interpret her message of revolutionary love. I'm excited to read her new book See No Stranger, which is just out.

black and brown bodies

I was stumped by this for a recent zoom simul gig where my speaker was in the US but my listeners were in Latin America. In a pinch I used cuerpos negros y morenos, but I know that doesn't quite work. In some areas of Colombia moreno is understood as having some African heritage, in others it's not. This has actually been a contentious issue for the census, with Afro-Colombian groups asking that the term be used to increase self-identification as Afro-Colombian and the census refusing to consider it a term for Afro-Colombianness (Paschell 2013). At any rate, I'm looking for a better option that, again, works not just in the US but in Latin America. Obviously, there is no such thing as neutral Spanish that will work across all countries, but I'm looking for something that will work in lots of contexts.

Friends have suggested:
- cuerpos negros y con tono de piel oscura 

- cuerpos negros y oscuros
- cuerpos negros y no blancos
- cuerpos negros y de color

What do you think readers? Any other good options out there?

Note: the image is from the PERLA project, where they went around Latin America and asked people to identify what color they were on this palette. Interviewers also marked their own read of what color the person was. For full results see Telles (2014).

Paschel, Tianna. “‘The Beautiful Faces of My Black People’: Race, Ethnicity and the Politics of Colombia’s 2005 Census.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 36, no. 23 (2013): 1544–63. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2013.791398.

Telles, Edward. Pigmentocracies: Ethnicity, Race, and Color in Latin America. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014.

somos gente de chagra: we cultivate the jungle

Amazonian chagras are such a rich cultural concept that they are hard to convey simply so I was impressed by this rendition, which I saw in the subtitles to this powerful 10 minute documentary about indigenous Siona
deminers in the Amazon, featured in the New Yorker. I highly recommend it.

car protest: bocinatón

Car protests, car rallies, car caravan actions, or my favorite English term, honk-ins, aren't new, but they're certainly suddenly more common as a safer way to protest together. Sometimes people drive slowly around a target (like an immigration detention center, or City hall), sometimes they park all around it and honk.

I will admit that I just cooked up the term bocinatón for them, inspired by the recent velatón actions in Colombia. I was happy though to find several uses of it when I googled it - all from Chile from several years ago but hey, the term might spread more widely now. I would be curious to hear what else folks are using.

desmercantilizar: decommodify

Es hora de desmercantilizar la vida!
It's time to decommodify life!

Thanks to Lorena Zarate for this one.

Of course the term decommodification means different things to different people. It's one of the ten principles of burning man, and explained by Caveat here, where they say:

"When we commodify we seek to make others, and ourselves, more like things, and less like human beings.   “Decommodification,” then, is to reverse this process.  To make the world and the people in it more unique, more priceless, more human."

Amediero (Col): sharecropper

I stumbled on this one in the official UN translation of the Colombian peace accord, where they give it the following footnote:

"“Amediero” means a farmworker who partly (a medias) cultivates the land in the sense that he
shares the produce with the landowner" (page 90 of the translation)

chuzadas (Col) : wiretaps

There is yet another surveillance scandal in Colombia. It involves various forms of electronic surveillance, not just the phone tapping that the term wiretap tends to imply, but the term surveillance is so much more formal than chuzada that I lean to using wiretap. But I'm curious to hear if others have a broader but still informal term to suggest. Here's a great short video on why this scandal matters.

biketivism: biciactivismo

I learned this one from Paola Castañeda, who has a new article out about biketivism and the right to the city in Bogotá in Antipode.

The map here is an image of all of the streets that are bike only in Bogotá on Sunday mornings, thanks to biketivists. I particularly love that there are fresh orange juice vendors on the sidewalks regularly along the way.

paco (Chile): pigs not police

One of the most inspiring things this year has been the violador en tu camino phenomena - but I have frequently seen paco, in the original, translated into English as police. That changes both the register and the feel of it. Instead I would suggest cops, pigs, popo, five-0, or some other slang version that feels right in your context - but not the police. Sidenote: the black band over the eyes is a reference to all of the Chilean protesters who have lost their eyes in the recent protests. Hideously it seems that Colombian riot police have taken up that tactic of the pacos and lately are likewise aiming at the eyes of protesters. Pigs.

how to subtitle your street action!

I am so inspired by how this powerful feminist art protest action has traveled around the world. This version was done in Sheffield, and check out the fabulous way that they offered subtitles!

climate emergency: emergencia climática

"El Parlamento Europeo declaró este jueves la "emergencia climática" en la Unión Europea, convirtiéndose así en el primer continente en hacerlo, a unos días del inicio de la cumbre del clima de Madrid (COP25). ...."

la manada: the pack or the wolf pack?

In much of the English language coverage of the recent hideous court decision about this case it is being translated as wolf pack, but I would have just rendered it as the pack. Can't manada be for various sorts of animals?

"Tranquila, hermana, aquí esta tu manada" chant the fabulous women in this video, protesting the ruling in the 'la manada' case, where a judge in Barcelona just ruled that it's not rape if a woman is passed out.  The men who gang raped the 14 year old then posted pictures of it on social media, calling themselves 'la manada'.



When I was in Barcelona last December I saw this protest graffiti: