As in build the number of people active in the organization, the grassroots base.
I know what a difference having a steady income flow makes for grassroots groups so this is a plug for those of you making year end donations - consider instead upping the total a bit but breaking it up and making it an automatic monthly sustainer pledge on your credit card. It will be easier on your budget and much better for theirs.
Or gender neutral: desaliñade. Not exactly a social change related term - other than that social change folks may tend to be (though certainly not the folks in this picture). Also not sure if this use if particular to Colombia? I was reminded of this term, and given the translation, by the great compas at Pirate Wire Services, which I highly recommend. Check out their inspiring story this week on a gang truce in Colombia (that the picture is from) and subscribe! You can subscribe for free though donations help them keep doing this good work.
hacer una denuncia: issue a public condemnation (or ...)
Depending on the context sometimes 'file a complaint' will be a better fit. Sometimes you can just use denunciation (it has surprisingly high googlage actually) but I think public condemnation will be more clearly and widely understood.
I suppose this could also be deliciously alive, but vivir sabroso is clearly a play on vivir bien - and since that is living well it makes more sense to me to keep the same structure. Note that this is quite different than vivir bonito. For those who haven't been following the Colombian election campaign, vivir sabroso is a tag line being used by the historic pact on the left. Here's a ton of energy and excitement for real change this Sunday! And a goofy fun short video to set the mood.
This term is used in Colombia. Is it is also used in other countries? If you've heard it elsewhere please say so in the comments. I saw this translation in this NACLA article about the inspiring resistance of the Misak: Indigenous Community Confronts a Colombian Paper Giant.
They are “reclaiming the territory to reclaim everything.” Indeed.
Perhaps not normally a social justice term, but back in 2016 there was an explosion of bollards in Bogota, which was seen by many as a misuse of city funds by the mayor to cover up other scandals. They even put in bollards to protect other bollards, such as those in this photo (thanks to @ContraGodarria on twitter for the pic).
I have always seen plan lazo imported into English in discussion of Colombian history and politics, so I was surprised by this rendition in this recent very mainstream timeline of US-Colombia relations published by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).
Plan Lazo is widely written about as establishing paramilitaries. Note how the CFR reframes this in the following text:
In response to the persistence of armed guerrilla groups in the countryside, U.S. military advisors, led by General William P. Yarborough, work with the Colombian army to develop a comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy known as Plan Lazo (the Snare Plan). The plan centers on public works projects, civilian defense networks, and an aggressive military assault on “independent republics” formed by communist insurgents during La Violencia. Plan Lazo becomes the template for decades of counterinsurgency and civic action programs in Colombia.
(photo is of Yarborough)
I have blogged repeatedly about options for campesino. None of them are great wihch is why I tend to import it. It's a concept that just doesn't translate well since it includes not only family or small-scale farmers but also farmworkers, loggers, artisanal miners, and lots of other people that live in the campo. I liked the way this great article (that helped me see how we need to look both above and below the land to understand land issues in Colombia) went back and forth between using small-scale farmer and campesino throughout, though again, that leaves a lot of people out.
My compa Kath Nygard has lately been trying to convince me to use peasant. As I've blogged before, it's worth nothing that the Via Campesina uses International Peasant Movement as their official translation. I don't think I'm quite there yet, since the connotations in English seem still too closely tied to Monty Python type peasants (see video).
Another cacerolazo tonight in downtown Bogota. These things start from a few distant clinks then blossom out of nowhere. It means there’s still high energy behind ongoing anti-government protests in Colombia and suggests high turnout at mass demonstrations called for tomorrow. pic.twitter.com/wlMJCxHcha
— Dylan Baddour (@DylanBaddour) May 5, 2021
Cacerolazo often gets imported into English, as it has been in the English wikipedia entry. I like this solution but my concern is that often people don't know the term and won't understand it at first. To build stronger movements it is worth translating it at least the first time it comes up.
Sometimes, as in the word reference forum, I've seen it rendered as pot banging. But it's not just any random pot banging! It's pot banging as a political action. My first thought was a pot bang-in - playing on the term sit-in. But that will sound to most listeners just like banging. It's also true that what is magical about this action is that is an action of dispersion, not of concentration. We generally do it in our homes by the window, not gathered together (though in Bogotá last spring sometimes people would gather on street corners to bang together). The term bang out is completely a play on words neologism made up by me, but I like it for conveying this idea of leaning out your window and banging your pot. I've definitely broken a pot from too much banging so don't use your best one, or set aside an old one for this activity!
This is the translation give by a group of this name that is a queer collective land project in Puerto Rico. They are working for food and land sovereignty in Borinken, including designing a solar composting toilet. They are asking for support for their work to share the design and the tools and support to help folks across the island build their own. Brilliant. I'm a huge fan of composting toilets when done right - but it really helps for folks to have support to make that happen.
I will note however that the German word ''Überfremdung'', widely used by anti-immigrant parties, is translated as over-foreignerization and one assumes they mean something entirely different by that. But let's not let them steal the word from us!
Fantastic article here by Allison Corbett about movement T & I (translation and interpretation) - and going beyond T & I. I can't recommend it enough if you care about how we make our movements stronger by making our spaces more multilingual. Love the geneology given and the important nods to my compas Alice and Roberto here. The one correction I would make is that we also had a team of interps at the first US Social Forum in Atlanta, though certainly not as large as we would have liked.
No, this is not a word, it's a tool.
"Diatopix es una herramienta que muestra, en la parte de la Web correspondiente a una lengua, la distribución geográfica del uso de palabras, términos, expresiones, etc. La herramienta usa el motor de búsqueda personalizado de Google y muestra por separado los resultados obtenidos en los principales países donde se usa dicha lengua (Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, España, México, Venezuela).
If you are going into Spanish it can be a way to see if you are using a term that will be more widely understood or not. I found it super surprising to see the results for the words parce and parcero, I have always thought of them as very Colombian slang but they have decent googlage for other countries too - and more for Spain than Colombia!
Thanks to Robin, who suggested diatopix in a comment on my post on the term whiteness.
I was reminded of this term by the anti-racism daily, an email I appreciate receiving and recommend. In it they describe sousveillance as "people capturing stories with their own devices (usually smartphones) that will likely counter or disprove the facts presented by those with more power and privilege (Nieman Lab)." The article they link to there has another great description: "Surveillance is looking from on high. It’s what security cameras and dash cams and body cams do, it’s what dash cams and body cams do, and blue light security cameras. It’s what the “authoritative gaze” is, but sousveillance is quite different. It’s looking from below, and it’s attempting to counter an official report that may have been lies."
I thought at first that the translation might be contravigilancia - but I think that's actually counter-surveillance, which is to say efforts to prevent surveillance from above, rather than doing your own surveillance from below. So I did one of my favorite tricks, I went to the wikipedia entry in English and then followed the link on the left to the Spanish entry and, what do you know, the French word is also imported into Spanish. But for those who don't know it (most of us probably) you could first render it as vigilancia inversa.
Protester's videos of police terror in Colombia have been so important in the last few weeks, and offered powerful sousveillance - yet I find myself less and less able to watch the videos of police terror and torture, and find them more and more traumatizing, so not including one here. Still, grateful for the citizen journalists doing this important sousveillance. If you are on twitter please follow me @spaceforpeace where I'm tweeting regularly about the protests (mostly without the difficult videos).
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