caminar la palabra

walk our talk (be the change)

I've seen all sorts of strange literal versions of this - most recently 'may words walk'! very poetic, but just not how we're used to saying or hearing it in English. When someone's words and actions are congruent we say they walk their talk. They practice what they preach.

For more on whether or not Gandhi actually said 'be the change you want to see in the world' see this good bit on it from the metta center.

I came back to academia in part because of my frustration that solidarity organizing often did not ‘walk the talk’, and had trouble ‘being the change’ we wanted to see in the world. It is hard to work together across gulfs of distance and difference without falling into old colonial patterns. My other blog, decolonizing solidarity, talks about these issues. Much, but not all, of it focuses on the tactic of solidarity. I turned to accompaniment for my research because it is the solidarity tactic that most explicitly uses inequalities based on colonial histories. Can even accompaniment be decolonized? Can geopolitical/racial privilege actually be used against empire and for justice and peace? Dissertation deadline? early May.

School of the Americas Watch

SOA Watch = Observatorio por el cierre de la Escuela de las Americas
(I've been leaving out the por el cierre but the Latin American encuentro of the movement settled on this, for greatest clarity)

check out this AMAZING presence on the stage at the SOA Watch vigil last week by MECHA students.

derechos de petición (Colombia)

rather than translate literally I would render this as: similar to freedom of information requests (known as FOIA requests in the US - but just freedom if information in the UK and Canada - and since this is understandable in the US I would go with that).

Kudos to Peter Cousins, of FOR, who used this phrase in a newsletter talking about the new book by Javier Giraldo about the peace community of San Jose. As he puts it, "The substance of the book meticulously recalls the acts and threats of violence against the Peace Community over the 13 years of its existence, and details the derechos de petición (similar to freedom of information requests) concerning these attacks which have been sent to various governmental representatives, and either ignored or treated superficially."

the black caucus (US)

bancada de congresistas afrodescendientes, o la bancada negra

fue como tradujeron a Angela Davis en este articulo sobre racismo en Colombia

great social justice translation/bilingual media work opportunity

did you hear about the great protests in Copenhagen for climate justice? want to be part of the fun and excitement in the next round?

Climate Justice Now! is looking for Mexican and other students from the region committed to climate justice to serve as CJN!-COP16 interns/press room support at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP16) in Cancun Nov. 27-Dec. 11.

Students interested in helping must be committed to fighting for climate justice and working to support grassroots activists, leading policy thinkers and researchers, especially those from the global south.

Ideally, each student should be FLUENT in Spanish & English so they can work fast, in the frenzied UN conference space. Each student MUST have her/his own cell phone and her/his own laptop, with functioning WIFI--and with SKYPE up and properly functioning.


Students will be in and outside of the official conference hall and they might be assigned to cover external side events.

Responsibilities will include, but will not necessarily be limited to:
• Assisting on internal and external media operations: Press releases will be in English and Spanish, at least. It will be a MAJOR PLUS if interested students speak any other UN languages...French, Russian, Arabic, or Chinese.
• Logistics

• Blogging in English & Spanish.
• Note taking: Interns may be asked to divide up and cover sessions deemed relevant by the CJN! and strategic affiliates. They should be expected to take session notes in English &/or Spanish and may be asked to write blog entries or co-write press releases on these sessions--in cooperation with our press team--in English or Spanish.
• Possible co-support, rapid research as needed and requested for marginalized observer and country delegations.

Again, ideally each student will be FLUENT in Spanish & English so they can work fast.

These positions are unpaid. Students must arrange and fund their own travel to Cancun.


Interested applicants send resume to Lauren Gifford at laureng@dartmouth.edu

great training for social justice interpreters

At Wayside, in Virginia, Dec 3-5

WHO THIS IS FOR:
Bilingual social justice activists and workers who would like to learn more about interpreting and translating in a social justice context to empower immigrant communities and build alliances across communities.

SESSIONS WILL INCLUDE:

* Interpreter Role and Ethics
* Interpretation modes
* Use of interpreting equipment
* Differences and similarities in social justice interpreting
* Impact of language barriers in social justice movement building
* How to create a multilingual space

More info here

it's a piece of cake

pan comido

now if only finishing my dissertation were that easy!

zona campesina

"small farmer reserve zone" - see the video below about this zone, one of various attempts in Colombia to create safe/peace spaces - also called humanitarian zones, peace laboratories, peace communities, communities for dignity and life, communities in resistance, and I'm sure other names that I've missed.

plata o plomo

I recently watched this movie, and in it a DEA officer mangles this saying. His Spanish is so bad he says they were facing "plato o pluma"!! Talk about how accent can change meaning! Plate or pen. I'm still chuckling in horror about this. Dramatically less dire than bribe or bullet! If you want to be even clearer and aren't doing simultaneous, you could render this as 'take the bribe or take the bullet' - as Winifred Tate does in her fabulous book (2007, p. 49). This is a threat that was widely used on Colombian government officials by drug traffickers in the 80s.

Tate, W., 2007. Counting the Dead: The Culture and Politics of Human Rights Activism in Colombia, 1st ed. University of California Press.

compromise

It depends on the way the word is being used (ie, with what definition),
but it is usually NOT compromiso!! (a common and dangerous false cognate).

My friend Sarah Henken asked me to blog what I use for this. I like punto medio acordado (and when doing simultaneous after the first time I just use punto medio). There's also acuerdo mutuo. Any other suggestions?

lobbying

lobby: hacer incidencia (cabildeo, lobby)

Last week John Pluecker commented on advocacy that Mexican human rights activists and lawyers were using the term "hacer incidencia" - but this is actually what I use for lobbying, as distinct from the broader term of advocacy. In Colombia I often hear the term lobby used in English, as in, 'toca hacer lobby.' I think the RAE would probably go for cabildeo, but this seems more formal and less widely understood to me than incidencia. Thoughts?

advocacy/advocate

advocacy: intercesion
advocate: intercesora

This is my favorite for general use, but in some contexts defensora or promotora might be a beter fit. I'm not a huge fan of abogacia because intercesion covers it, but doesn't get people thinking of it as something only done by abogados.

dichos

Dicho: caballo matado siempre se pandea. A horse with a sore back will always flinch. What do you think this means? It is supposed to mean that people are sensitive to the mention of their defects, but would you have guessed that if you didn't know? Here's a good example of where translation is not enough. Sayings can be SO hard.

white man's burden

white man's burden: la carga del hombre blanco

see the English and Spanish wikipedia entries about this, as linked above.

The term comes from Rudyard Kipling's famous poem, which begins:
Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.

mountaintop removal take two

Here's another activist video about this tragedy, this time about how it is being done in Colombia. The term they use here is "mineria contaminante a cielo abierto", which I like better than megamineria a lo abierto, which is what they used in this Argentinian video

be part of the Voice of Love project

THE VOICE OF LOVE Project is a pro bono, all-volunteer project spear-headed by Advocates for Survivors of Torture and Trauma and Cross-Cultural Communications (which has resources for community interps - check them out).

THE VOICE OF LOVE project is developing a three-day interpreter training program to support quality services to survivors of torture, trauma and sexual violence.

As part of needs assessment for this project, the VOL team is currently conducting focus groups and surveys of interpreters who work with survivors and staff who works with survivors and interpreters. These work products will be made available free of charge to any agency that serves survivors.

If you interpret for survivors of torture, war trauma and sexual assault, in refugee resettlements, and/or for mental/behavioral health services, please take a minute to support this great work by taking this survey.

vereda (third time is the charm?)

vereda: hamlet; rural community.

I've posted twice before about the Colombian term 'vereda. I keep changing my mind on what I like. FOR these days seems to mostly use hamlet. PBI in the video below uses rural community which I like, though it's pretty vague.

the amazing babel box

Affordable appropriate tech simultaneous interpreting equipment. Need I say more? This is so obviously a wondrous and dearly necessary thing. Check it out, from the uber activist geeks with the mostest, the Intergalactic Interpretation Collective, it's the ...... babel box! Great name or what? They provided the equipment for the recent US social forum. See the set up below, and their site here.

the language you speak shapes how you think

Well, duh. But great article about recent research on this here, in the WSJ. Strangely, as my stepdad pointed out, it doesn't mention the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. But still, worth a read.

I recommend the whole thing, but here are some good nuggets:

Take "Humpty Dumpty sat on a..." Even this snippet of a nursery rhyme reveals how much languages can differ from one another. In English, we have to mark the verb for tense; in this case, we say "sat" rather than "sit." In Indonesian you need not (in fact, you can't) change the verb to mark tense.
In Russian, you would have to mark tense and also gender, changing the verb if Mrs. Dumpty did the sitting. You would also have to decide if the sitting event was completed or not. If our ovoid hero sat on the wall for the entire time he was meant to, it would be a different form of the verb than if, say, he had a great fall.

In Turkish, you would have to include in the verb how you acquired this information. For example, if you saw the chubby fellow on the wall with your own eyes, you'd use one form of the verb, but if you had simply read or heard about it, you'd use a different form

...

* Russian speakers, who have more words for light and dark blues, are better able to visually discriminate shades of blue.
* Some indigenous tribes say north, south, east and west, rather than left and right, and as a consequence have great spatial orientation.
* The Piraha, whose language eschews number words in favor of terms like few and many, are not able to keep track of exact quantities.
* In one study, Spanish and Japanese speakers couldn't remember the agents of accidental events as adeptly as English speakers could. Why? In Spanish and Japanese, the agent of causality is dropped: "The vase broke itself," rather than "John broke the vase."

what is the easiest way to do subtitles?

A friend just pointed me to the site dot sub as a free and easy way to do subtitles.

Has anyone used this? Liked it?

Any other suggestions for subtitling that's easier and more accesible to activists than full on video editing software?

regalías

regalías (Mex): benefits (ie sick days, health insurance)



This is a great 15 minute documentary that you should watch if you've ever been on a vaction to Cancun, or are considering it. It reminded me that regalias is used this way in Mexico, though it certainly isn't recognized as meaning this by the RAE. You might notice that they also translate barraca as labor camp.

tokenism

I've posted before on the term token, and there was a great discussion in the comments about how token is different than the effort to reach equality through quotas - basically quotas can be useful as a way to get to equality, as loaded as they can be, and it is not a term to participate in pejorativizing. Months later my colleague and friend Jonathan Sanders just sent me this great follow up idea:

"I had a thought about how to translate "tokenism" and related adjectives, nouns, etc.

"hacer acto de ser incluyente" or "hacer acto de inclusión". The same way you can "hacer acto de presencia" in the sense to "put in an appearence" just so that they you know you were there, you "hacer acto de ser incluyente" so that you go down on the record as supporting diversity. What do you think?"

I think it's fantastic! What do others say?

talking heads

talking heads: cabezas pensantes

Thanks to my friend Juan Carlos in El Salvador for this one. It cracks me up that in Spanish they think, in English they just talk. No, I don't mean the band. You know what I mean, the old guard leadership (las vacas sagradas) all up at a speakers table, just talking at us, no interaction, no participation, very old school. I continue to be frustrated at how much of this still goes on in the movement. Let's walk our talk and talk differently!

(the lettering on this New Yorker cartoon is tiny but it reads "the subject of tonight's discussion is: why are there no women on this panel?")

reverso

I've been having good look lately with reverso, an online dictionary that's new to me. Even better yet, it has twofirefox add-ons so you can get in that fabulous little search bar in the upper right where my word-reference dictionary also lives (links to those and other goodies you can have live there in the tools section on the left of the blog).

mountaintop removal

fantastic video! which Argentinian tv refused to air. here they call it la megamineria a lo abierto. what term have you been using? and how many mountains went into your gold ring?