Guerrilla Translation is a P2P translation collective and cooperative founded in Spain. Our group is a small but international set of avid readers, content curators and social/environmental issue-focused people who love to translate and love to share. We are not volunteers, but rather are building our own innovative cooperative business model which “walks the talk” of much contemporary writing on the new economy and its power to change. Find out more about us by clicking on the links in the sidebar.

Who we are

Guerrilla Translation is an activist translation and general communications collective. Our high quality translations are made by thoughtful humans, not software. To help support activist translators and freelancers to use their skills for causes they care about while also making a living, Guerrilla Translation has developed a new kind of livelihood vehicle. It combines two functions: a voluntary translation/media collective working for activist causes, and an income-generating cooperative agency providing translation and communication services. We see this as a form of “economic resistance”: a means of ethically coherent, sustainable livelihood for knowledge workers, and the creation of a multilingual knowledge commons that upholds open-source, global idea sharing.

Our vision

Good translation is a powerful catalyst for change through cross-cultural knowledge sharing. We also believe that a translation’s quality should equal that of the original work. Beyond these ideas, the GT project tackles cultural and labor-related problems endemic to the creative and digital industries with a sophisticated value accounting model. Our combined aim is to enrich the international conversation about potent strategies for positive change, through our high quality translation and media work, and our ethical value model.

Our mission

We want to preserve the crafts of translation, editing, illustration and design, and support the craftsperson by creating a friendly working environment, a sustainable way of working, and final results that are exciting to read and inspiring to share. Our connection to the Commons Transition movement positions us to model more equitable, cooperative business and governance structures for the millions of precarious workers worldwide, engaged in creative production.

What we do

In addition to crafting high-quality translations and communications work and building an international knowledge commons, the GT team uses its many combined years of wisdom and practical experience to help change the way distributed collectives can work. To achieve this, we maintain a practice of documenting processes and their outcomes capable of inspiring a large audience of social change-makers to action.