Talk:Santa María School massacre

Notes on the translation work
I came in on this article project yesterday, when it was rated at about 30% done. I did two saves yesterday (not realizing my login had expired). Just now I have almost finished it. Left to do are most of the footnotes, most of the strikers' list of demands, searching for internal links in English Wikipedia to match the internal links given in the original, and miscellaneous words I didn't know. Most of the words that defeated me I put in italics; in particular, oficina, dirigente, casucha, a bunch of terms in the strikers' demands. The vocabulary in the list of strikers' demands -- which of course was not written by the Wikipedians -- is very difficult.

In many places (strikers' demands, article text) ordinary Spanish words are used in what to me are odd and unfathomable ways, e.g., 'oficina' apparently means "mine" (or perhaps "works" or even "mining towns"). That shows the limits of my proficiency. Another example in this category: "[dueños controlaban] a todos aquellos que se dirigían a realizar negocios en las oficinas". "Dirigirse" normally means to travel toward something to direct your attention to something (make your mind travel to it). "Controlar" traditionally means "check", "inspect", but under English influence it can mean "control". "Negocios en oficinas" normally means "business conducted in offices", but again, "oficina" here is not indoors. Then there are the obscure words like "chullador".

This Spanish original is lousy. It's disjointed, in many places stupid (like in the second sentence, referring to the just mentioned "masacre" in the plural with "estos eventos"). In yet other respects it is an example of a genre I know well from my youth: a Marxist tinged polemic flawed by vocabulary by turns strident, oafish, clumsy, pretentious pseudo-sociology and pseudo-political science. In examples from Hispanic America, in addition, there is use of words in peculiar senses. This criticism is absolutely NOT MEANT to apply generally to Marxist writing or to study of history, Latin America, or labor movements.

Some of the specifics I object to in the Spanish original of this article are as follows. Vague wording like "the social question" and "impose minimal social laws" (I translated the latter as "enact minimum labor standards"). Gratuitously working into the text the phrase "the state" and other tropes of the aforementioned socialist militant polemic genre, as in "the agents of the state" instead of "the authorities". Using terms of ambiguous reference ahead of providing the context which would disambiguate them (e.g., "leaders" and it's not clear which leaders). In Spanish, seem wildly redundant and/or nonsensical, like "tipo de cambio" -- which means "exchange rate" in today's everyday Spanish, in regard to *wages*. "Cycle of strikes" instead of "series of strikes". General stupidity (motivated by hamfisted vehemence) as in "this massacre caused the stilling of the movement for nearly ten years, in the face of the violence exercised by agents of the state", where the entire phrase "in the face of ..." is stupid because "the violence ... state" is the very massacre: "this massacre cowed the movement for years on account of the massacre". "Hechos" is used a lot, used in a confusing variety of senses: facts, events, details. How's this sequence in the opening paragraph: "la matanza ... fue una masacre ... estos eventos (i.e., este evento) ... Los eventos que configuran los hechos, suceden ...", "the slaughter ... was a massacre ... these events (i.e., this event) ... The events which shape the facts". "The facts" refers to the massacre. Hurmata (talk) 22:21, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

I've got the resistant Spanish words down to these few: cachucho, chullador (apparently from a Quechua word, chulla), rampla, se reducirá a escritura pública, casuchas of the Club Hípico, fuego graneado, patio, recién. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Hurmata (talk • contribs) 03:23, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

Here's a Web page that explains the first two words on the preceding list. http://www.altoimagen.cl/main_pioneros.htm Hurmata (talk) 03:56, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

More gap fillings and more corrections
This bilingual dictionary is news to me and it's already been quite helpful: http://dictionary.reverso.net.

I had mistranslated FAENA as duty. In the Cono Sur, it can mean either work crew or workplace. The above mentioned page on nitrate mining technology explains that CACHUCHO is a "cooking" trough pot (in this process, instead of roasting the ore, you steam it) and CHULLADOR is a settling trough or pot, because it receives the liquid output of the cachucho. So they both belong to the refinement of the CALICHE (ore of salitre). I decided to go with courtyard for PATIO. My misgiving is that there may be multiple equivalents in general, and that here, where the word occurs twice, the best translation may call for different equivalents. RECIÉN -- the whole paragraph where it occurs is incoherent and maybe even contradictory, so I omitted the clause with this word in it. I found a URL with a photo slide show of one or more "oficinas". One shows a RAMPLA calichera, another a correa, a transport belt, which is inclined. A castellano-galego glossary of construction terms equates Sp RAMPA to Gal RAMPLA. Yet I found an interview with a Spanish coal miner where "ramplas anchas" are galleries in a coal mine. Rampla is not in RAE. From the above photo, I can't tell what a rampla is. Open pit mines are cut in terraces called benches in English (bench is the flat part of a terrace). Maybe that's what a rampla is. Google SE REDUCIRA A ESCRITURA PUBLICA and nearly all the top hits are from .cl domains -- Chile. Probably a Chilean legal formula. Seems to mean "will be 'caught' and 'caged' in a "public" document, will be legally binding (once it's signed, of course)." Wonder if "public" has the force of "legal"? CASUCHA: a club wouldn't have "hovels". What in a gentlemen's club would resemble a shack or hovel? DECADENCIA INSTITUCIONAL: forerunner rendered "institutional decadence" but it's not, it's "institutional decay". PERIOD vs ERA: Google and see that "parliamentary period" is much commoner than "era" in English lg scholarship of this phase of Chilean history, and likewise "periodo parliamentaria" is even more common than "epoca". Hurmata (talk) 10:38, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

I have proofread my work and resolved all untranslated terms -- by deleting them in the cases of recien and casucha. All that's left to do is copy over all the sources -- to be placed under the Reference heading. There's a problem with these citations: no page numbers, so they aren't really valid. Hurmata (talk) 12:36, 23 June 2008 (UTC)


 * I think PATIO translated as courtyard is correct. The Spanish paragraph containing the word RECIÉN is unclear for me too. RAMPLA means Trailer, but the word is also used as a synonym for RAMPA (Ramp). In my opinion, CASUCHA may refers to stable in the article's context, although hovel or shack are a more fair translation.


 * The "18 pence" related sentences are incorrect, which is because of lack of context in the original Spanish sentences. I'm searching for more info about this issue. For now, I have found these papers: See page 21 (145 in the original file)See page 12.- Jespinos (talk) 22:55, 23 June 2008 (UTC)


 * The text of the strikers' demands is incorrect maybe in part because their text got corrupted as it circulated over the course of a century -- it's effectively a piece of folklore, and that's what happens to songs and folktales. BTW, the correct text reads quite easily, except for the two or three mining terms. About words. FAENA: I was right the first time after all, here it DOES mean "tasks", "normal duties"; even "job description" in modern U.S. parlance. There were almost a dozen occupations among the mineworkers. RAMPLA is "trailer" now, but probably wasn't a century ago. Here's what it was: an "estanque destinado a almacenar caliche". I read that on p 435 in this fabulous book history of the miners and the industry that has, like, EIGHTY PAGES of mining technology and mining industry terms and gazetteer, ON TOP OF interviews with really old miners and their family members, tables of economic statistics, and more. (Sergio Gonzalez Miranda, 2002, Hombres y mujeres de La Pampa: Tarapacá en el ciclo de expansion del salitre). I'm going back to those books to find out whether an "estanque" is a bin or just a space in the open air set aside for piles (because the word normally means *pond*). Since the RAE dictionary doesn't have it, it must be a word from French or from a Spanish dialect other than Castilian. It's almost the same as the French word for "reuse" (REE-YUCE, the noun), phonetically *ramplwa* (remploi). CASUCHA: I also guessed it meant "horse stable", but I don't know any Chileans I can ask about that, and it doesn't matter. We can add or remove any detail we please as long as we're telling the story well. I predict the answer is in the sources, and it'll take me two or three days to wade through them. Hurmata (talk) 06:11, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

Need for a thorough rewrite because of so many false or unsourced statements
I appreciate comment inserted above, today. Today I started to read some of the books that were cited in the Spanish version, and I found out that this version is a travesty -- much worse than I have already decried. A damned shame in view of the intrinsic importance of the subject and the quality of the books. Those sources are not to blame for the falsehoods and stupid writing. Here's just a sample of what I found, combined with a few repeats of previous complaints. False statements of fact:
 * It says the first works to be struck was called San Lorenzo. But there were five nitrate works in Tarapacá Province by that name. In Hispanic America fashion, their names included a local place name.
 * Alto San Antonio is represented to be a nitrate works, but it was a canton of the province.
 * The text given for the strikers' demands does not match the text cited in one book (it's a book in Spanish by a Chilean historian, E. Devés V., La huelga obrera en Chile, a history of the first 40 years or so of the Chilean labor movement. The text I translated almost reads as if written while drunk.
 * Our article has one warship arriving each day on Dec. 17 and 18, but according to Devés, there were two warships each day.

False citations of sources:
 * Collier and Sater do not use the phrase "institutional decay". What they report is that in the first decade of the 1900s, a large number of Chilean authors preached that there was a *national* "decline", by which they meant the idleness and excessive self-indulgence of the wealthy.

Etc., Etc. Hurmata (talk) 06:11, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

Page "Moved"
I have performed "Move" (I have renamed) this article. The name was inaccurate, misleading, and too long. It gave the impression that the school was name "Santa María de Iquique" (Saint Mary of Iquique), when actually it was named for a recent president of the country, surname "Santa María", and "de Iquique" just means it was located *in* Iquique. To judge from Googling, in Chile the massacre is usually called "the slaughter at [de] the Santa María School". Sometimes the specification "in [en, de] Iquiquie" is appended [matanza de la Escuela Santa María en Iquique], and sometimes the word "massacre" [masacre] is used instead of "slaughter" [matanza]. I will update links to this article as I find, without waiting for a bot to do it. Hurmata (talk) 03:41, 26 June 2008 (UTC)

Category:Saltpeter works
The "Salitreras" (Saltpeter works) are an important phase of the economic, social and political life of Chile at the end of the 19 century and beginning of the 20 century and they must be put in a common category in order to inform the reader about the relation to other articles in the wikipedia.

This rationale is valid also for some articles that are still "stub"-class. The fact that the Salitreras are not mentioned in the stub doesn't mean that it is not related to. It means only that the article has to be improved to a normal WP article, this regards for example Pedro Gamboni. --Best regards, Keysanger (what?) 09:23, 21 March 2013 (UTC)