Guerrilla Translation – Our New Year’s Revolution
If you’re reading this because you were subscribed to our old site… thank you! Your support has meant a lot to us and we treasure it highly. As you browse the new site, don’t forget to subscribe once again (as your old subscription may not work). While you’re at it, why not encourage your friends to do the same? Alternatively, if you’d like to follow us in Social Media, here’s our Facebook, Twitter, Google + and RSS feeds, and here’s our YouTube Channel.
If you follow us, you may have noticed our absence recently – here’s why. For the last few months, we’ve been creating two totally new and separate sites: guerrillatranslation.org for English content, and guerrillatranslation.es for Spanish.
Come and see the new Guerrilla Translation!
We’ve been working harder than ever to develop Guerrilla Translation in accordance with our principles, so we can continue to share information that matters by providing pro-bono, professional quality translation of material full of world-changing ideas.
Our new web pages now have a more magazine-like presentation, in line with their purpose – to showcase journalism you wouldn’t have otherwise had access to unless you are bilingual, on post-capitalism, the P2P/Commons movement, economic and ecological change, and many more of today’s most socially relevant topics. We’ve also been developing our communications agency, in order to reach our goal of making our project self-sustaining by providing us with a livelihood – which, in turn, allows us to continue producing the pro-bono content. To date, our blog has published about 100 Spanish and English translations, transcriptions and edited texts, ranging from around 500 to 9,000 words in length, and many subtitled videos. Now, we’re ready to share more than ever, with a better format for reading and navigating our site.
As valuable (and popular) as it was, the old website was a product of our own ingenuity and circumstances, completely DIY with all the bumps and lessons learned in the process. It suffered from a number of limitations: both target languages were presented inline, most of the content wasn’t easily accessible from the main page, and the menus were impractical, among other things. All of our content is now easily accessible from the menus. One thing we did love about the old site was the “widescreen” cover image. We’ve recreated that in the new site with a special “featured content” section. We’ve also created a separate section for our blog, featuring updates on the recent activities of GT and its members, and a dedicated space for our video-subtitling work. And we’ve updated and enlarged our static content pages: apart from our Founding Principles and our FAQ, you’ll also find our updated authors page.
For the (nearly) two years we’ve been working, we haven’t provided a means for you to offer gifts or donations; we now have a dedicated page for this purpose. Likewise, if you appreciate our work and want to support us by engaging our services (or recommend us to someone who may), you can read about the way we work on this page. To cap it off – and we’re especially thrilled at sharing this – we’ve compiled a series of testimonials on our project from some of the authors we’ve worked with.
Over the last several months, we’ve welcomed some new members, who have been crucial in helping to realize our latest changes. In particular, we must acknowledge Guy James (also of the P2P Foundation and FairCoop) for his invaluable and tireless assistance in getting the new web pages ready, and Carmen Lozano Bright (independent journalist and P2P researcher), for helping build strong community bridges and for taking on the management of our special projects. Please come and meet all of our members on our updated team bio page.
Ultimately, Guerrilla Translation exists for us to share information with our peers worldwide, and to help us all change the dominant narrative of our times, incorporating new stories that carry human and environmentally grounded values. It is our hope that these new websites will help us to continue sharing these stories across nations, cultures and languages. ¡Viva la revolución!
Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel, co-founders
Produced by Guerrilla Translation under a Peer Production License. – Lead image by ABCNT