Fausto Giudice, February 21, 2026
It was February 21, 2006, the date chosen to
launch the Tlaxcala website (then tlaxcala.es). The adventure had begun in September 2005.
Manuel Talens, a Spanish writer and doctor living in Valencia, responsible for
translations for the rebelion.org website, had conducted a long interview with Gilad Atzmon, the jazz
saxophonist and writer, ex-Israeli and anti-Zionist. Having asked Gilad if he
knew someone to revise the English version of the interview, he put him in
touch with an American activist author living in Italy. Then, at Manuel's
request if he knew someone to translate the interview into French, our jazzman
put him in touch with me. I was then collaborating with a Muslim website and
had been trying for two years to organize translation work for that site. At
that time, the Internet was still a compartmentalized world; 99% of sites and
blogs published in only one language. English exerted an overwhelming
supremacy.
Once contact was established, the three of us
began discussing the possibilities and prospects for organizing a transnational
network of translators. Each of us contacted the few translators we worked
with. We found ourselves with about twenty people. We agreed to write a
manifesto to explain our project, which aimed above all to combat the supremacy
of the English language on the web while allowing English speakers, generally
monolingual, to access texts written in other languages in order to see beyond
their blinders. In January 2006, our manifesto was ready. We asked Spanish
graphic artists and a developer to design a multilingual website suited to our
ambitions.
To the question of when to launch our website,
I proposed the date of February 21, to place our network under a triple
patronage: that of General Augusto Sandino, Missak Manouchian, and Malcolm X:
all three were assassinated on that day, in 1934, 1944, and 1965.
From about twenty at the start, we were a
hundred two years later. From 2006 to 2021, about 250 people worked with us,
some just passing through, others providing regular work. From six languages,
we grew to fifteen, from Esperanto to Chinese, including Tamazight and
Serbo-Croatian. In the first fifteen years, we published around 70,000
documents.
Manuel's passing in 2015 dealt a severe blow to
Tlaxcala, from which we never recovered. Then in 2021, another catastrophe: our
second website (tlaxcala-int) disappeared overnight, and our French hosting
provider answered our questions with deafening silence. The suspicion of an act
of censorship demanded by the usual suspects could never be confirmed. So we
continued our publications on a blog created a few years earlier when hackers
had littered our sites with Viagra ads and our developer took a few weeks to
clean up.
Where do we stand today?
In 2005-2006, multilingualism was practically
non-existent on the web. Twenty years later, the New York Times publishes part
of its articles in Chinese, Arabic, Creole, French; El País also publishes in
English and Portuguese, and even Le Monde, which translates some of its
articles into English. Numerous websites are now multilingual, from Pravda or Russia
Today to transnational political groups, whether trotskyist, environmentalist,
anarchist, or simply anti-capitalist.
The big change has come in the last two or
three years with the explosion of artificial intelligence. From Google
Translate, which gradually improved after catastrophic early years, to Deepl,
the number 1 of “Deutsche Qualität,” we have moved on to chatgpt, deepseek and
other claude. The question is therefore: can we do without humans for
translation? My answer is no, no, and no.
1st No: AI still makes mistakes, when it
doesn't suffer from hallucinations.
2nd No: AI obviously has no human
relationships, neither with authors nor with readers.
3rd No: AI translates but does not interpret.
However, translating is, as José Martí said, transpensar, to transthink.
The Tlaxcala network now only exists virtually.
But we remain a handful of Mohicans continuing the fight against the walls, hatta
el mout, hatta el nasr (until death, until victory).
Below, a magnificent text by our friend
Santiago Alba Rico, published on February 21, 2006.
Tlaxcala Against the One or How to Translate a Lamb
Santiago Alba Rico, 21-2-2026
I have always found it strange that you need a
piano to play the piano, that kind of wooden dinosaur that you have to pound
with both hands; just as I find it strange that no one finds it strange that to
translate a text from one language to another, you don’t need cranes and
pulleys, ropes and levers, to lift all that weight off the ground. In the
languages I know, all of them poorly, “to translate” (tradurre, traduire,
traduzir, translate, übersetzen) evokes the very physical operation of
relocating a load, of hauling a package, of transporting and lifting and
placing a grand piano somewhere else. Also in Arabic, where the verb
"tarjama," from which our Spanish "trujimán" or
"truchimán" or "dragomán" derive, shares the field with
"naqala," literally "to transport," whose central guttural
"qaf" materializes the very robust image of a truck full of oranges.
I think the members of the Tlaxcala collective won’t feel uncomfortable if I
imagine them as sturdy truck drivers or stevedores (women and men) who accept
and take pride in the social character of both their means of transport and the
explosive material they carry.
The wind that carries the seed and pollinates
the barren field over the fence, is the translator of wheat!
The river that carries water, boats and silt
from one country to another without drying up at borders, is the translator of
life!
The impetuous lip that carries saliva to the
lover’s lip, is the translator of fire!
The bricklayer who carries bricks to build a
house, is the translator of endeavor!
The stevedore loading bales at the port, the
miner pushing the trolley, the maquiladora worker laboriously transforming
fabric, are the translators of captive power!
The militant passing a message, the resister
transmitting clandestine information, the student distributing an angry
newspaper, are the translators of the limit!
The peasant transporting weapons to the planet’s
Sierras Maestras, is the translator of his people!
The poet carrying the common names of an
unforeseen possibility, is the translator of the future!
But for that very reason, and conversely,
Tlaxcala, hive of translators, phalanstery of verbs, is wind, is river, is
saliva, is brick, is stevedore, is miner, is maquiladora worker, is peasant, is
militant, is poet.
There are three mysteries. First: we speak.
Second: we speak different languages. Third: we can translate them. Of the
three, the most enigmatic and definitive, the one that best defines us as
humans, is the last one. A lion and a butterfly have nothing to say to each
other, a zebra and a lamb may collide, but they cannot exchange places. What
distinguishes men from animals is that only men can translate and be
translated. Only that which does not admit translation is a species,
only that which cannot be translated is a race and that is why a zebra
is a prison. If something cannot be translated, it is not free. Racism,
xenophobia, sexism, imperialism, capitalism, fiercely oppose all translation,
they want to exhaust the world in its watertight species, they treat men like
single-version zebras, like untranslatable lambs. To translate is to
leave the zebra; that is, to leave prison. Translating a lamb is turning it –
pouring it – into a man.
The opposite of translating is reducing:
reducing a prisoner, reducing a revolt, reducing a village to ashes, reducing a
house to rubble, reducing a people to misery. That is the vocation of the
Empire. Monsanto wants to bridle pollens and wind; Lyonnaise des Eaux wants to
can rivers; Repsol wants to coagulate salivas; fire, trolleys, fabrics, fields
speak a single language, an idiolect, and there is no other to move them to.
The story of Babel is pure propaganda: so that men together would not build that
threatening tower for heaven, God later had to create an empire that would
prevent translation and generalize a contentious common language. You need at
least two languages to understand each other and a thousand to agree. To divide
men, God imposed a single language on them and locked them in it. The Pentagon
and NATO take care of reducing houses and bodies; El País, CNN and The New York
Times, among others, take care of reducing minds. The Empire cannot be
translated: it is one, total and intransitive.
The figure of the translator has always been
marked by a kind of original failure: he was the cobbler patching up the
ravages of Babel, the half-light lamp that barely managed, as in the beautiful
Cervantine metaphor, to show the reverse of the tapestry, the traduttore
traditore resigned to transferring maimed meanings, approximations,
gropings, and to receiving the contempt with which forgetful messengers are
dismissed. Tlaxcala, cooperative for the transport of voices, mobile fleet of
common words, starts from the opposite and much more accurate principle: that
danger and failure is monolingualism; that it is the One that prevents unity;
that only an alliance of differences can triumph over the Whole. Tlaxcala was
born to rejoice in the hubbub of Babel and to dispatch its trucks, with weapons
and with oranges, in all directions. Tlaxcala was born to affirm the social
character of language and the linguistic character of emancipation. Tlaxcala
was born to combat imperial English and also to save English, reduced –
untranslatable – to a summary, imperative, dry, sharp, spherical and deceitful
language, a species and not a language (and not zebra but hyena), a
prison and not a river, an absolute idiolect that can only be rehabilitated and
liberated, like its own speakers, by letting translations from other languages
enter its bosom.
Pulleys and cranes, ropes and levers, I am
moved and I personally thank (as a basic oligoglot) the muscularly social work
of translators (those from Rebelión and those from Tlaxcala), without which we
would continue to be zebras or hyenas in the zoo of CNN and El País. Tlaxcala
wants to be the School of Translators of Toledo of anti-imperialism, the army
of interpreters that builds, brick by brick, the noisy tower against the
silencing One, the linguistic arm of the revolution that will liberate the
wind, the rivers, the saliva, the trolleys and men. The world is a translation
and all its parts are original. Let the One beware, Tlaxcala has begun to
translate the Union.
