Textual Healing: our new newsletter!

Congratulations on signing up to our new newsletter! Long-term fans might remember that our old one was “polyrhythmic” (i.e. erratic), but this is going to be plain old rhythmic: same time (second Thursday of the month at 2pm CET), same place (your inbox).

It’s a place for us to tell you about any particularly cool/public work that we’re doing, inform you about events that we’re involved in, and show off our latest pro bono Lovework translations. We might expand the format to include our own content, interviews with friends, or excerpts from Lovework that we’re especially proud of.

This will also be an (almost) exclusively English-language affair. We may launch a Spanish one, but that would be its own thing entirely. Our work overlaps, but not enough to simply translate this newsletter, which is a shame, because we love translating.

This first edition will be a recap of what we’ve been up to since we last had a newsletter. It’s been a while and there’s a lot to get through, so please, excuse the bulletpoints!

First, a sprint through some highlights of our work!

Last year, we copy-edited a book for the Brussels Office of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.

• It’s called A Europe of Capital, it’s about corporate capture and lobbying in the EU, and you can read the whole thing online here.
• It’s written by longstanding thorn in the side of European politics Kenneth Haar, from the Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO, great acronym).
• It’s an eye-opening way to lose faith in 70-80% of what happens in Brussels. Having double-checked most of the references, we can assure you that Kenneth's research is airtight.
• We’re currently translating it into German, if that’s more your thing.

We’re writing business case studies for the Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL, another cool acronym).

• The first one, on Peruvian company Inka Moss, was published last November.
• The second one is currently being finalised, and is due to be published this month. It’s about Manos del Uruguay, who have the raddest cooperative model we’ve ever seen, and they’ve been doing it for 56 years! More on them in the future.

We’ve translated (among many other things):

• a bunch of stuff for RLS Brussels, including German translations of their Northern Exposure series on Nordic politics
• art stuff for the Barcelona Contemporary Art Museum (MACBA, regular acronym)
• online stuff for our friends at Smart coop
• this really cool tool from our pals at Colaborabora, which we’ve actually used to structure some of our own meetings

Our Spanish team have kept busy as well. Their recent highlights include an ongoing collaboration with Ecopolítica, as well as a couple of book translations, including a Spanish edition of Lynn Murphy and Alnoor Ladha's Post-Capitalist Philanthropy.

We’ve upped the ante on our public speaking and activism.

In September we spoke at the Translation Village festival alongside Mona Baker(!). Enormous thanks to our friend Gökhan Firat for organising.

Our very own Timothy penned a fantastic article on the evils of AI in the translation industry for the Data Workers’ Inquiry, a project headed by Milagros Miceli of Technische Universität Berlin and the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR, yet another wonderful acronym). Many thanks to her for inviting us to participate.

• We also spoke on behalf of the translation industry at the Inquiry’s online event a few weeks ago, alongside some inspiring folks from the worlds of film, art and activism.

I (Alex) will be appearing in the flesh for a panel discussion on translation cooperative models at the 11th European Society for Translation Studies congress, alongside GMC bestie Gökhan Firat.

• It’s at the University of Leeds (my alma mater, weirdly enough).
• The conference is from 30 June to 4 July 2025.
• Our submission was peer reviewed by 5 academics (proud smiles).
• If you find yourself in West Yorkshire this summer, come on down to be inspired/cheer me on/watch me sweat.

We’ve also put out some fantastic Lovework translations over the last year.

We launched an Open Call to get the submissions to come to us, and it’s yielded some really cool results. Since launching the first call back in 2023 we've translated:

• Abya-Yala based cyber-feminist fanzine Descuartizadora, in its entirety. This was a real potpourri, and included an article on how the internet impacts sex work in Chile, a guide to misogynistic web forums, an interview with a hacker collective, and some transfeminist science fiction.
• an elemental triptych of wonderfully verbose articles from Argentinian magazine Anfibia on water, fire and plastic
• an article by Rosa María García on radicalising autism diagnosis
• a particularly powerful piece on the October floods in Valencia, an especially personal choice given that Valencia is where I call home

Our Spanish members have also been churning out Lovework, with most of their pieces published on our longstanding blog page in Spanish news outlet El Salto Diario. Highlights include Gaza is a Blueprint for Ecofascism, from New Internationalist, and Against the Smart City, by Adam Greenfield.

Translators Against the Machine!

Last but certainly not least, we're putting a new project into action. Last year, we launched the Translators Against the Machine initiative, with a view to building networks in a profession increasingly threatened by AI and capitalist greed.

We've just launched an open call for articles on the personal experiences of language professionals of all kinds – if you're a translator, interpreter, researcher, agency worker (etc etc) we'd love to hear from you!

We're planning to publish these articles online, and to eventually put out a dossier/e-book of some kind. For more information, click here.