Translationista Needs an OWS Intern!

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.

And if you are interested in joining our ever-growing ranks of volunteer translators able to translate out of English into all the languages of the world, please get in touch! You don’t have to be in NYC or even in the country to participate. The more of us there are, the less work there will be for any one person. The Occupy Wall Street movement has gone from tiny to enormous in three short weeks, and the reason it has grown so quickly is that it represents a sort of truth-telling that has been marginalized by the corporate mass media in the United States. For the first two weeks, the mainstream media refused to report on OWS, or did so only dismissively. Now the movement has grown to the point where it cannot be ignored, and it has touched a lot of chords both here and abroad. We are translating its messages both for the sake of foreign-language communities here at home and for our friends around the world. We would love to have you join us.

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.

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  1. admin says:

    Forum for German Translations Group:
    http://owstransger.phpbb8.de

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