Recipe of the project Common Translation

Abstract

The recipe presented in this paper aims at synthetising metaphorically the methodology deployed in the project Commons Translation, an effort of distributed cooperative translation of books related to free culture and the commons carried out by university lecturers and students, as well as external collaborators. This recipe of what we call “commons-based peer translation” is inspired in the ideas of lots of cooks, and some of those ideas are extracted from the same works we translate. In this sense, two cookery books have been especially helpful: the first one is Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks, a crucial recipe book about the art of commons-based peer production; the second one is Chris Kelty's Two Bits, where the anthropologist analyses thoroughly (and exquisitely) the condiment characteristic of the best cooking of free software: recursion. Both works are an inspiration for our translation efforts and at the same time constituye the objects of such translation: the cooking of new communities and knowledges.