Translating the revolution
We must put more effort into translating revolutionary literature, but also street news, into more languages.
A translator acts as a bridge across cultures by importing or exporting not only books but also concepts and fresh ideas across distant countries. Most importantly, however, the translator is capable of transferring new innovations across linguistic and political boundaries; innovations that might be scientotechnological, artistical, philosophical, or political - the latter category being of special interest to revolutionaries.
The proletarian struggle, especially its anarchocommunist and autonomist currents, is internationalist because the proletariat confronts the same cruel exploitation everywhere. Thus, revolutionaries need to escape the language boundaries in order to reach the minds of comrades in different places. Translation of new revolutionary innovations becomes even more important in a world where the bourgoisie is being globalized, which results in easy propagation of new security measures across the states.
It is necessary to put more effort in translating in as many languages as possible revolutionary, anarchist, and autonomist literature, but also news from the street and briefings on imprisoned comrades. Translations into languages spoken by immigrant communities is also very important. While some languages might seem more popular than others, all are important.
Some texts are too large to be translated by a single working comrade. Therefore, it would be a good idea to set up anonymous wikis on the internet and put the original text there, allowing any visitor to translate from a single word to whole chapters. This way, everyone will be able to contribute something, no matter their free time. A well-built wiki software package can be found at http://www.mediawiki.org/
Teaching foreign languages can also be organized in squats and other social centres used by our movement. Some squats around the world already organize free lessons for various languages, and this trend should continue.
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Thursday June 11, 2009 07:25
by Anonymous
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Jump To Comment: 1Absolutely! We need "relays," as Gilles Deleuze put it, between languages, between movements, between moments, so that we can learn from one another. My own efforts have been concentrated on enriching the relatively impoverished English-language anarchist archives (we have English translations of only a fraction of Proudhon, for instance, and much of the global record of anarchist controversy and achievement and invention and critique is simply linguistically invisible to us). Some friends of mine and I have indeed been experimenting with wiki-architectures and other online tools to facilitate collaboration, but we still want more participants. See, for instance, www.collectivereason.org and http://www.negations.net/radical-translators-discussion...-list .
I am determined to learn more languages, too. Right now, apart from a little facility with French, I can only read well enough in a hodgepodge of European languages to glean a few things from anarchist archives there and in the Americas, albeit slowly, poorly, and with effort. Learning to speak Spanish is my next goal, and I would imagine that it should be a priority for English-speaking anarchists in the U.S.
For others reading this, I'd also like to emphasize -- I have found this work to be extremely exciting, personally rewarding, even oddly relaxing (doing a short translation, for me, has something of the pleasure of doing a crossword puzzle, only an especially tricky and sophisticated one -- and when you're done, instead of throwing it away, you have a new piece of knowledge that you can share!). Every translation makes my world wider, shows me things I hadn't imagined. Try it!