MY HEART BROKE AFTER READING THIS. This is a message sent by someone who’s in Marawi City. English isn’t my first language but I’ll try my best to translate this text message.
“Arianne. Jessica.
Both of you are my two best friends. You’re like a sister to me. You don’t know each other but I just wanna say that I love you guys so much. There is no signal here right now. We are under attack by ISIS. And we are hearing gunshots and grenade. Our mayor isn’t confirming the situation in here to the media. If you know someone, or if you have a connection to the police, soldiers or whatever, we are calling for help. Marawi is on red alert. Someone was beheaded, civilians were shot, schools were burnt. I am telling you, ISIS does not represent ISLAM. These people are evil. I love you guys. I don’t know if I’ll ever see you again. I love you so much. Forgive me if I ever done you wrong. I’m not sure what will happen tomorrow. Heard that it’ll be worse tomorrow. I am traumatized by the gunshots. They’ve been saying that this situation is still mild and tomorrow will get even worse. Electricity was cut off in some places and I hope they won’t do that here.”
As a Filipino, it is hard for me to cope with this. Many of our brothers and sister sin Marawi, Lana del Sur are suffering because of the greed of a few. It is hard to accept the fact that we are battling against our own kin by force to restore peace, but it is still not visible in the horizon before us. After hearing about what happened in Manchester, we also grieved with them. We knew how it felt like to be unsafe in the only place we call home.
This was not caused by our Muslim brethren, it is caused by terrorism. It chooses no age, no gender, no status, no RELIGION or even nationality. IT CHOSS anyone. The only way to fight is to spread awareness and unite against them.
oh my gods, someone S P R E A D this
G U Y S
PLEASE, I don’t care what religion or what belief you have in you or if you’ve got nothing at all,
but please, P L E A S E pray for my brothers and sisters in Marawi…!
Of all things to happen – why must this happen when we see a glimpse of hope in our country?!.. Why now?!..
Please pray for them.. pray for us… Pray for the Philippines.
The whole net neutrality discussion seems to be focusing on download speeds and access to particular services, but does anybody remember back in 2006 when AOL got caught blocking people from sending or receiving emails that expressed criticism of AOL? There was no sign that it was happening, and the emails would appear to be delivered – AOL’s mail servers would even report a normal “accepted for delivery” status code – but they’d just never show up in the recipient’s inbox. Or how about the incident a year earlier where Telus imposed fake service outages for websites expressing support for the
Telecommunications Workers Union? Again, no indication that any blocking was taking place: just a error page falsely claiming the affected sites were down.
Under the proposed deregulations, this sort of thing would be explicitly permitted, and we know it’s possible because it’s been done. Now consider how much more communication happens via the Internet in 2017 than in 2005/2006. It’s not even email or websites; big chunks of the telephone network now pass through ISP-mediated VOIP channels, and those conversations would likewise be targetable by faked outages.
Like, this isn’t some dystopian sci-fi scenario; we’re talking about horseshit that major ISPs were getting up to on the sly over a decade ago, and are now about to be told can be engaged in without regulatory penalty.
This happened? That’s serious.
By the way, that kind of scenario is how censorship in China works. They don’t throw up a page saying the content is illegal, they just route it in such a way that the packets go around in circles and time out. ISPs could easily start pulling all kinds of tricks to demote things they don’t like – they have the option of not routing it correctly, slowing the bandwidth to a crawl, or just stopping the request and sending back a 404. We need to keep Net Neutrality.
Oh, yeah, it happened. The cited incidents aren’t even the half of it – they’re just a couple of the better known ones.
For example, there was the time that Comcast blocked Boston-area subscribers from accessing their GMail inboxes, and when folks called their support line to complain, they falsely claimed that it was a technical issue on Google’s end and tried to sell them a Comcast email account.
Or the time that Madison River Communications ended up getting fined for their VOIP-metering scheme when it turned out that they were interfering with 911 calls made by users in their service area.
Or the time Verizon started selectively blocking text messages sent by pro-choice advocacy groups, even to recipients who’d explicitly opted into them.
Again, none of this is hypothetical – this isn’t stuff we imagine major telecoms will do in the absence of strong net neutrality protections, but stuff they already have done, and in many cases only stopped due to regulatory pressure at the federal level.
I’ll give you a more benign example: If you use Cox’s DNS servers, if you typo a domain name, instead of gettign a ‘host not found’ page, you get their search engine instead with the typo’d domain name clearly listed in the search bar of it.
Cox also runs what is likely the largest transparent SMTP proxy in the area- if you are their customer, regardless of who your actual mail provider is, you have to use their SMTP servers to send mail from. otherwise, it just times out.
Hey all! This poem is part of my chapbook Miss Translated, which I produced in a limited run as Town Hall Seattle’s Spring 2017 artist-in-residence. The main conceit behind this work is that to accurately portray my relationship with Spanish, I have to explore the pain and ambiguity of not speaking the language of my grandparents and ancestors. As a result, these poems are bilingual … sort of. Each one is translated into English incorrectly.
The poems I produced have secrets, horrific twists, emotional rants, and confessions hiding in the Spanish. It’s my hope that people can appreciate them regardless of their level of Spanish proficiency.
oh shit. my spanish is pretty shaky, but i’m pretty sure “te perdono” is “i forgive you.” wow understanding just that much is pretty chilling.
and something about…blood? and transformation? oooh yikes. she didn’t want legs in the spanish version did she. and it was a painful process.
so this poem is about…misunderstandings leading to pain for the person misunderstood? whish is really effective with the way it’s written, wow. this is the most meta poem form i’ve ever seen. wow.
<— This right here is AMAZING. Look at the journey this person went on reading my poem! Secret fact, I have been stalking tags and reblogs of this because what I wanted more than anything was to provide an experience for people and LOOK AT YOU ALL GO. Your engagement and enthusiasm is amazing and so humbling for me.
Holy crap, this is incredible. As a natively bilingual Latina woman, allow me to dive into a full analysis.
First, I should tell you my experience of reading this. I didn’t even look at the English at first, because I didn’t know that the mistranslation was the point, and of course I didn’t need it. So I read the whole poem in Spanish and thought it was really sad and moving. Then I looked at the English and my eyebrows went right up to my hairline. Why the hell would you translate it this way, I thought.
Then I read the caption and realized that this is a genius way of demonstrating how translation into English can be an act of colonization and violence.
I would translate the first two lines as “The mermaid rose from the sea / To see the dry world.” They’re very neutral lines. She was curious about the dry world, so she went to check it out. That’s a very different connotation from the mistranslation, which tells you that the mermaid preferred the land to the sea.
The second two lines I would say mean “She found a fisherman on the beach / this beautiful fish without a net.” She’s the one with agency here, not the fisherman, and she thinks of herself as a free fish, unconstrained by a net, not as a fish without a home.
The next three lines by my lights read “She had a gleaming tail; scales / that covered her breasts, arms, and face / and a wake of lacy waves.” Again, it’s from her perspective, not the fisherman’s, and she thinks of herself as having a gleaming rather than oily tail, a lacy wake rather than a frothing one.
Next stanza: “The fisherman caught her by the tail / and cut it in half.” From her point of view, the fisherman has committed a sudden and senseless mutilation. Then he goes, “’Now,’ he said to her, ‘you have legs. / Why don’t you walk?’” It’s almost like an accusation. You have legs now, why don’t you just get up and walk?
My read on the next stanza is: “The mermaid began to sing to the sea / for aid, her blood transforming / the sand of the beach into rainbows.” The sea is her home, not the land, and she’s crying out to her home in pain as she bleeds.
Then the poem ends with “She sang to the fisherman, ‘I forgive you, I forgive you, I forgive you.’”
The reason this mistranslation is so brilliant is that it takes a story about a mermaid trying to forgive a man who’s committed senseless violence against her, and turns it into a story about a man who uplifts a woman to a better life out of the kindness of his heart. And the thing is, that’s exactly what happens to so many stories from colonized cultures when they’re adapted by the oppressor. Translation into English, and further the cultural language of the oppressor, can be an act of violence and erasure rather than one of respect.
This is why I have worked so hard to translate poetry from Spanish to English that has previously only been translated by white Americans who learned Spanish in college. I can bring something to the translation that they can’t. It’s usually not this extreme, but this exists to some degree in all translations by people who don’t truly understand the culture that produced the work they’re translating.
it was a fucking house phone that i was so stoked to have because it was mine that i kept in my own room and i cannot believe technology has progressed at the speed of FUCKING light to the point where this is a hilarious artifact to have had in like 6th grade and now theres kindergarteners with iphones
How did you know if you dialed the right number
each button made a different tone so the numbers you dialed a lot became a subconscious melody in your head and if you hit the wrong button by accident it would sound like a wrong note in a song you know by heart
i can’t beleive that is a legitimate question in my lifetime
Other acceptable answer: the wrong person answers on the other end.
Another acceptable answer: the robot lady comes on the phone and tells you number doesn’t exist.
The Paradox Machine 