to swarm is enjambrar so for swarm the state how about enjambremos el estado? image, of course, is from the fabulous beehive collective   Their amazing art that tells stories of the struggle is available at beehivecollective.org ..read more

I have blogged here about many dangerous false cognates related to social change, such as municipio and judicialización and proyectos productivos and plataforma (search false cognate in the search bar for many more, I've been at this for a while). Comunitario is another. In English communitarian, Webster says, means of or relating to social organization in small cooperative partially collectivist communities. Sometimes this might be what comunitario refers to - but at least in Colombia it often seems to just mean community, or community based ..read more

 "! تعبنا, تعبنا, I hear over and over again, when watching Gaza in Arabic. It could be rendered in English as simply we are tired, we are tired, but a more accurate translation would be, we have come to the limits of ourselves, we are empty, exhaustion consumes us. تعبنا, تعبنا, Gazans repeat, speaking in plural even when interviewed alone. As miraculous as Palestinian sumud may be, it is not limitless. Our endurance should be a means, not an end. What Gaza longs for—deserves—is justice, liberation, and life." From this gorgeous essay on the work of the witness, which also addresses the ..read more

I can't believe I only just now learned this word. Endosex is the opposite of intersex. I am an endosex person, as my physical and hormonal presentation fits normative medical and social ideas of what a woman's body is "supposed" to be like. Endosexism then is discrimination against intersex people. It has google of only around 6,500 in English and 350 in Spanish, but I did find this definition of it in Spanish as "incurrir en sesgos, discriminar, marginar o patologizar cuerpos intersexuales". Go Universidad de los Lagos in Chile for posting this! N.B.: this is the intersex pride flag ..read more

I just learned this word in Spanish here in Mexico City and made up this English translation. Captures perfectly how I feel after several days here. There are just SO MANY people a toda hora!  ..read more

I noticed today in this interesting Guardian article about indigenous drug runners in the Amazon that they kept the term maloca and followed it with "circular communal house." That nagged at me because it does not convey that it is a traditional indigenous structure, nor that it is sacred and ceremonial space - and I know that some of them are not circular. Interestingly the wikipedia entry calls them "an ancestral long house used by indigenous people of the Amazon." Hmm, that also seems a bit off, because they are often round, not long (though in fact I've been in several long ones). I would ..read more

In Colombia usually the term panfleteo references the spreading around town or just left in front of certain people's houses of short one page flyers with death threats. To use the term pamphleting or even pamphlet for this does not work well. In English pamphlets are usually in color and folded, at least once but usually as a trifold. I don't see death squads taking the time for this sort of layout and folding! Usually the sorts of things the death threats use in U.S. English we would call a flyer. But just calling this flyering in English would not carry the connotation of death threats, thu ..read more

It used to be somewhat common to use the @ to denote, say, juntos y juntas. The problem is that it still reinforces the gender binary. I don't think the * solution is common, but I like it. I was reminded of it by the book Junt*s transformamos a Colombia. Not sure how you pronounce it though - as juntes? The e ending has become more and more common since I first posted about it in 2015 (my all time most read post). I like it, but some are insisting on including the a and o as well, so in this case juntos, juntas, y juntes - meaning that e would not capture male and female, but just nonbinary ..read more

Comuna 13 (Col): District (comuna) 13 This is another one that sometimes gets rendered with the extremely misleading false cognate commune. I wish that everyone held property together in the comunas of Medellin but that is most certainly not the case! You could also use borough for this, but that is such a New York City specific term for large divisions inside a city that I think district is a more global English rendition. You could also keep it as comuna and just add the definition of district the first one or two times it comes up.  Comuna 13 is particularly known for Operation Orion ..read more

I have posted about caserío before, and rendered it as small village. But yesterday I was showing my reconciliation seminar students the Basta Ya video about the war in Colombia as part of our study the outputs of truth commissions (as an aside, this video is from 2013 but frustratingly the recent truth commission has not subtitled any of their videos and the few translations I have found of their texts into English have not been done by translators and are chock full of errors). I noticed that in the video they subtitled caserío as small rural community and I think that is not half bad. Villa ..read more