Earlier today, I was made aware of a book called CIA Shining Path: Political Warfare written by someone very close to Juan Velasco Alvarado, President of Peru and pro-soviet socialist (so tankie in fact, he contemplated invading Chile after Pinochet’s coup).
The book only exists in Spanish and through some effort, I managed to grab a pdf which I’m uploading here https://gofile.io/d/o8OlG0, and I managed to auto-translate the book in a raw file.
I now have the translation on a google drive and I need help from my comrades who want to contribute to do the following (in this order):
- Clean up the document. There are a ton of PDF artefacts left. Page numbers, line breaks that shouldn’t be here…
- Use styles to format the text. Chapters, subchapters…
- Finally, proofread the translation and fix it. If you speak Spanish and can compare to the original book, that’s even better (I have some Spanish comprehension but I doubt it’ll be enough).
If you want to participate, just comment here and I’ll send you the link as anyone with it can edit the source. Then you can just get to it as you want. I’m gonna be adding some instructions on the first page for editors but yeah, that’s about it.
Much appreciated!
I read the introduction (in Spanish), and its extremely interesting. Basically the author lays out an argument that the “Shining Path” was a reactonary movement, not revolutionary nor Marxist. Unfortunately I wont have time to contribute to the translation.
It certainly seems like a trove of information just from the few bits I’ve been reading while formatting the document. The first chapter focuses on the geopolitical considerations of Peru and the rest of South America in regards to the USA and USSR. I’m fixing up the second chapter now which delves into the Shining Path, and some of the stuff the author says (from the machine translation, which is worth what it’s worth and will require side-by-side reading with the original material) really exposes the SP as a counter-revolutionary, opportunist force. He also claims it’s no secret that the CIA distributed the little red book in south american universities in the 1960s to exacerbate the sino-soviet split.
To be honest most of the work doesn’t even require much effort, just a lot of time. But any line fixed is helpful. Right now I’m consolidating all lines into paragraphs, as the PDF extracting messed up the formatting (but what else is new with PDF 🙄). So the work is pretty much this: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/819494707075743756/886599887989383218/GIF_12.09.2021_15-10-26.gif
If you ever want to help, even if it’s just 10 minutes, I can send you the google docs link. I use a simple system for progress checking so anyone can pick up at any time and start working.
The auto translation is worth what it’s worth, but with my level of Spanish it’s probably the best I could hope for (unless we could get a few native Spanish speakers who want to take a shot at it). It’s gonna be gruelling work comrades, but I think this is important work. From the few bits I was able to understand, I think this book is a very important one, from an indigenous Peruvian no less, and we have the chance to be the first to present it to a foreign audience. If the English translation goes well, it’s absolutely possible to think about making this book available in other languages as well!
I’d very much like to read this too.
If you’re willing to help out I could definitely use as many people as possible for the first formatting task!
Ahh I’m sorry comrade, if it was a few pages maybe, but 200 is way too much for me right now. But if you’d like to use my hedgedoc instance ( its a live collaborative editor, that would be great to do a lot of the conversion / collaboration in place ), let me know.
I’ve uploaded the raw files to a google doc so that people can easily contribute without having to log in. So far it’s working well, I hope we don’t run into issues down the line with this system.
My plan afterwards is to upload it to Prolewiki and thankfully it will retain the formatting and styles when copying it over there.
I’m insisting lol but even 10 minutes of help is appreciated, even one line fixed is helpful. As you only need the link to start editing, anyone can jump in at any time they want. But I prefer people tell me they can’t participate instead of tentatively agreeing and then never showing up.
The formatting effort is well on tracks. I’ve been able to enlist help from other comrades which does lighten the workload on my end, allowing me not to get burned out with this project lol.
We have corrected all pdf artefacts (it broke every line into its own paragraph), and I’ve done a lot of work formatting the document correctly now.
It’s honestly almost readable as is, deepl’s translation software is very efficient. I’m still looking for more Spanish speakers (was able to find one) so that we can get the best translation possible.
Again if anyone wants to help, you don’t have to commit long hours. Even 10 minutes of work is helpful – it’s 10 minutes I won’t have to do. Just ping me and I’ll contact you.
any update on this? we could go ahead and create the page even if the body content is not yet finished
A lot of work has been done, but at this point it’s very sporadic. I’ve been busy with IRL party work but I plan on continuing the book asap. However at this stage there’s no telling when it’ll be done.
perhaps the work ought to be done on ProleWiki itself so anyone can hop in?
I’d recommend uploading the file and creating a link to the library page for the transcription and I can make a maintenance category to track the progress of that work
It could, but what happens if two people edit at the same time and one saves their progress before the other? Especially with this kind of work, where you are more likely to spend 1 hour or more on it, it would be terrible if your edit gets reversed because someone else was editing at the same time…
I also feel the translation should only be publicly available once it’s perfect - while the machine translation is mostly legible, if we’re doing this we should do it correctly like a publisher. If there’s a way to restrict pages to members only that would be a possibility.
