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.
Monday, April 12, 2021
Globish
Friday, March 26, 2021
Nos queremos - vivas
Tuesday, March 9, 2021
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
Tuesday, February 23, 2021
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
Thursday, February 11, 2021
hashtivism: hashtivismo
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.
Sunday, January 24, 2021
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:
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).
Sunday, December 27, 2020
el rebusque: the hustle for odd jobs/gigs.
I was reminded of the difficulty of translating this term by reading the article
Friday, December 4, 2020
hacer presencia/acto de presencia: make an appearance.
Wednesday, October 28, 2020
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.
Friday, September 11, 2020
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:
Thursday, August 20, 2020
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:
Monday, August 10, 2020
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.
Tuesday, July 21, 2020
whiteness: blanquedad or blanquitud?
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.
Saturday, July 11, 2020
zoom simul tips

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.
Saturday, July 4, 2020
black and brown bodies

Friends have suggested:
- cuerpos negros y con tono de piel oscura
- 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).
Telles, Edward. Pigmentocracies: Ethnicity, Race, and Color in Latin America. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014.
Saturday, June 27, 2020
somos gente de chagra: we cultivate the jungle

deminers in the Amazon, featured in the New Yorker. I highly recommend it.
Tuesday, April 28, 2020
car protest: bocinatón

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.
Sunday, April 5, 2020
desmercantilizar: decommodify

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."
Wednesday, March 18, 2020
Amediero (Col): sharecropper
"“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)
Wednesday, January 29, 2020
chuzadas (Col) : wiretaps
Wednesday, January 15, 2020
biketivism: biciactivismo

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.
Sunday, December 29, 2019
paco (Chile): pigs not police
Tuesday, December 3, 2019
how to subtitle your street action!
Saturday, November 30, 2019
climate emergency: emergencia climática
Wednesday, November 6, 2019
la manada: the pack or the wolf pack?
"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: