ABSTRACT
Between 2011 and 2016, a series of mass protests, popularly known as the ‘movement of the squares’, took to the streets across a wide variety of countries (Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Greece, Spain, and the United States, among others). Despite their great diversity, they were united by an intense repudiation of local and global elites, blaming them for placing their own interests before those of the majority of the people. The introduction places the Spanish 15M movement and its afterlives within this group of protests, before presenting the main idea of the book: how translation has played a central, yet frequently unacknowledged role in these popular responses. Understood not only as a linguistic, but also a conceptual and political practice, translation has contributed to the development of a new activist lexicon, to experiments with forms of protest and collective agency, to the emergence of alternative means of communication, or as a means of finding commonality with other collectives, among many others.
