LASTESIS’ Un violador en tu camino : Chilean activism in three French-speaking cities across Switzerland, Belgium and Canada

On 20 November 2019, the Chilean performance collective LASTESIS devised a three-minute piece called Un violador en tu camino (A Rapist in your Path) that quickly became an international success. The performance protested violence against women and focused on how rape and gender violence are byproducts of patriarchal institutions. In the post- #MeToo movement context, the lyrics, as well as the simple yet poignant choreography, were appealing for their straightforward statement of the situation and were immediately adopted by international feminist collectives. Since then, several scholars have analysed the piece’s impact. Yet, what remains to be examined is how different translation strategies operate within the same target language across different sociocultural contexts. In this paper, I explore translation strategies across a larger corpus of translations in French-speaking cities within the global North in Switzerland, Belgium and Canada – Lausanne, Brussels and Montreal respectively. Considering that several of these iterations were performed in bilingual versions (French-Spanish), seemingly led by a Chilean/Latin American diaspora, I intend to illustrate some of the tensions between North and South, local and global through the different translation strategies selected by the collectives re-performing the piece.