Seeing that we have a ton of members now, I’m interested in reviving the translation project of a Peruvian book called CIA Shining Path : Political Warfare from Spanish to English.
This book has never seen circulation outside of Peru and even finding the PDF was difficult. But I have it here: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/888127637057339456/901878199896670279/642_digitalizacion.pdf
The author was a trade unionist close to the pro-USSR Alvarado government (or at least very favourable to it), and in this book he denounces Shining Path and Gonzalo as CIA agents. This is our chance to bring this book outside of Peru and the Spanish speaking sphere for the first time in history. Even if you don’t agree with the subject matter, I think this remains a very interesting book full of good info (historical geopolitical facts on South America for example) that should definitely see more distribution.
We started the project sometime last year and our schedules being what they are, all the volunteers (me included) got too busy and we put it on indefinite hiatus. If you speak good Spanish and feel this is a worthwhile project, I can definitely use your help. In my opinion this project does not require much central planning; it’s a google doc so just hop on it, and start editing wherever there is a need. What we do is once you’ve corrected a paragraph you color it red to show it’s done, and move to the next. That way you can translate whichever strings you want at whichever time you prefer and we make progress. You could do one sentence, one paragraph or one page a day as your time permits.
What we have so far is a machine-translated copy in English and, armed with the original PDF, we go through the document line by line and correct the sentences to the best of our abilities.
I’m writing this on the prolewiki community because the original plan was (still is for now) to publish it on prolewiki’s library, as well as make PDFs and disseminate them. But yes the editor would technically be ProleWiki.
If you’re interested just comment here and I’ll add you to the project!
I don’t speak Spanish fluently, but I can mostly understand Spanish. With the help of DeepL and my understanding of Portuguese (a close Latin language), I can definitely contribute to this project once in a while. Count me in, comrade!
Sounds good, I’ll send you the link. We will probably also need proofreaders, so being able to understand Spanish you could help rewrite and simplify sentences. But I think at this stage the most important thing is turning this whole book red (you’ll see what I mean on the google doc lol)
I’m interested! I’m busy for the next couple weeks but I would be glad to help!
Thanks for your interest! What would you say is your Spanish level?
Native English and my reading level for Spanish is pretty high but I don’t know how to quantify it. For translating into English it should be sufficient.
Sounds good, I’ll send you the link in DMs.
I’m down to contribute. I learned both Spanish and English growing up, but I’m definitely more comfortable with English.
Sent you a DM thanks!
I’m a native Spanish speaker and I am fluent in English, so I can help, I think the best way to go is to translate everything with DeepL and correct it from there.
Why did you chose to use Warfare instead of War?
Thanks for your interest, I’ve sent you the link over DMs. I actually got everything translated through deepl first but it does keep that very Romance structure which is just too complex for English and it requires a lot of work to clean it up. I got it translated through registering a free trial premium account and just sending the document through it lol. Tons of work to clean up the paragraphs and styling before we even got to proofreading though.
Regarding war or warfare, the two terms are similar but ultimately different and we weren’t sure which the author was referring to. While the title means political war (translated word for word), inside the book it would be more apt to talk about political warfare when he uses the term guerra politica. To my knowledge Romance languages don’t have a specific word for warfare (maybe Spanish does) and so we figured the author was talking about warfare, i.e. the ways SL engages in war, and not a specific, current war that the SL wages (though it could be argued they were waging a war against the Peruvian state, I think the author was talking about the larger methods of the SL). Hope that makes sense.
I can help, I am a native spanish speaker and fluent in english just gotta brush up on my redaction skills a bit and I can contribute when I get some free time from university
