Page Text: If you would like to translate any material on prole.info please get in touch by emailing:
Here are a few things to consider when translating:
Don't translate literally.
There is nothing uglier than a direct literal translation. The texts are extended arguments and are not supposed to be too academic. Use words that best make the point. "Abolish Restaurants" is translated as "À Bas les Restaurants" in French (literally "Down with Restaurants") and as "Inga jävla Restauranger!" in Swedish (literally "No Fucking Restaurants!"). If you are a professionally trained translator, feel freer than you normally would to interpret and change small things while keeping the general perspective the same.
Don't back translate.
The texts have some quotations from people who were originally writing or speaking in a language other than English. Guy Debord wrote in French. Karl Marx usually wrote in German. If you're translating into that language, please look up the original quote instead of translating it back again.
Check the technical language.
The texts use some terms from Marx's critique of political economy, such as "value", "surplus value", "commodities" etc... When translating these, please make sure you're translating them the way Marxist categories are normally translated. There is also some technical language that relates to different kinds of work, such as "two-tops" or "front of the house" etc... If you haven't worked in a restaurant before, and are translating Abolish Restaurants, for example, please talk to someone who has worked in restaurants to try to make sure this work related language is translated authentically.
Look at the pictures when translating.
When translating the text, feel free to change around minor things to make it sound better. But these are not just texts, so if you do this, make sure that the changes make sense with the drawings on the page. Also, take a look at the things written on shirts, signs, tatoos, posters, etc... It may or may not make sense to translate these.
Don't get too politically correct.
Every time it says "workers" in English, there is a problem for people translating into a language with genders. In French, activists sometimes use "travailleurs et travailleuses" (literally "workers [male] and workers [female]"), which is quite long, or more hideously "travailleursEUSES" or "travailleur-euse-s". These kinds of constructions exist in a lot of languages and should be avoided, if possilbe. Try to find the most elegant solution possible. You can replace "workers" with "we" in some cases, and in other cases you can use masculine or feminine words depending on whether the people in the pictures on that page are men or women. The goal is to get the text to sound like everyday language, not to sound like an official statement from a government or a trade union. If that means that sometimes the "male" (or for that matter "female") version of a word is used to mean both male and female, it's not the end of the world.
Thanks in advance for the hard work!