What a week it’s been. On Tuesday afternoon a call came in from the editor of the Occupied Wall Street Journal asking whether it would be possible to publish a Spanish-language edition of the Journal over the weekend; to do this, every last sentence contained in the issue would have to exist in edited Spanish translation by Thursday – i.e. today. I wasn’t sure it could be done, but I started talking to all the kind and generous Spanish-language translators from all over the world who had volunteered to help out, and, unbelievably, the complete text of the newspaper was ready to go to press a mere 36 hours later. The translators collaborated, checking over and editing each others’ work, and the texts prepared by a handful of very dedicated translators from Spain (a country that’s seen its own share of economic woes and protests lately) were vetted for Latin American audiences by translators from that part of the world. The product of this miraculous cooperation is scheduled to hit the Occupied Wall Street newsstand on Monday morning. And if you haven’t yet seen a copy of the original English-language Journal (with articles by Chris Hedges and other outstanding volunteer journalists), check it out online. Issue #2 should be arriving any day now.
Meanwhile you won’t be surprised to hear that organizing a large group of translators is a lot of work, and I wound up doing it pretty much on my own this week because there just wasn’t time to arrange to delegate any of the labor. But now that the OWS Spanish Translation Working Group is up and running, it’s time to set up the French Translation Working Group, the Arabic Translation Working Group, etc. And to tackle that huge organizational task, I could really use an intern or two. These should be patient, detail-oriented, web-savvy individuals in the NYC area who care deeply enough about the work of Occupy Wall Street to feel good about donating their time to the cause. If you’re interested in helping out, drop me a note and introduce yourself.
P.S. Update Oct. 10: I now have an intern helping out with general operations (whew), but still need someone Internet-savvy (preferably with basic website programming skills) to liaison with the Internet Working Group on behalf of the Translation Working Group.
Forum for German Translations Group:
http://owstransger.phpbb8.de