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Transitionese is a project that highlights and supports the International Transition movement’s linguistic diversity.

Spread over more than 1,200 communities in 48 countries, the Transition movement brings people together around the world to create a low-carbon, socially-just, healthier and happier future. Everyday people from these communities are producing all sorts of fascinating materials in different languages, including how-to guides, training materials, videos, interviews and research. Regardless of the tongue and format, a common dialect spans this wealth of content—Transitionese.

This has been the motto for the creation of a project aimed at expanding the capacity for multi-lingual translations of Transition resources.

The Transitionese project aims to:

  • Recognise and bring awareness to linguistic diversity within a global network;
  • Support the flow of learnings, information and narratives among different cultures;
  • Increase the number of documents translated, as part of the growth of Transition as a “Learning Network”;
  • Increase opportunities for direct interaction and exchange among national Transition Hubs, as part of the process of creating a multiple-node organisation;
  • Showcase and celebrate the work done in the past 10 years to spread the ideas and words of Transition by teams of translators all over the world;
  • Develop tools and skills for collaborative crowd-sourced translations, increasing the network’s capacity to “speak in tongues”.
  • Collect and share learnings and past experiences on translation among different Hubs and groups in the movement.

In March 2016, a team of three got together to take on the job of enquiring into and developing tools and process that could help strengthen the translation efforts of the Transition movement.

Sowing the seeds of Transitionese, the seven-month project resulted into a web platform (transitionese.transitionnetwork.org) that provides online Transition resources in different formats and languages—showcasing material in French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish, as a start, but ready for expansion into new languages as the process evolves.

Transitionese also provides an innovative crowdsourcing approach to the translation of resources and information: Transition’s open source account at Transifex serves as a platform for collaboration on translation, including the creation of teams, the distribution of roles, and the sharing of glossaries and translation memory.

The potential of these tools to support transitioners near and far in improving local, national and international capacity for translation is put on the table. But it will only reveal itself and go forth with your engagement and contribution. Do you want to get involved? *link to participate!*

About the catalyst team

The initial project was developed from March to October 2016 by a multilingual team of three people: Sara Moreira and Pedro Portela from Moving Cause (a Portuguese non-profit association whose mission is “to mobilise concrete utopias”), and Deborah Rim Moiso from Transition Italia.

The Transitionese team used the Dragon Dreaming project design approach: the project began with a Dreaming stage, whereby information was collected in conversations with key players throughout the movement. The project then moved to Planning and Action. The end of Autumn 2016 was a stage for Celebrating results, gathering learnings and feedback and Going Forth to new dreams.The design of the project was aligned with the seasons: Dreaming in the Spring and going into Action in Summer-Autumn.

You can read up on Transitionese in these blog posts:
Phase I – Dreaming in Tongues, March 2016
Phase II – Planning for people, May 2016
Phase III – Falling into Place, September 2016
Phase IV – Webinar and Transitionese Website Launch, October 2016

 

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