User:RM395/Course/Manypedia/Desaparecidos
By --Brodmont (talk) 23:53, 24 March 2013 (UTC)
I chose the topic "Desaparecidos" because I wanted to compare the treatment of a controversial topic in both English and Spanish, and I thought this was a topic that might be treated differently between the two languages. English and Spanish are the two languages I'm fluent in, and I would prefer to read the articles in the original languages, rather than depend on a machine translation.
One thing I note right away is that in both languages, the term "desaparecidos" redirects to the respective articles titled "Forced disappearance" and "Desparición forzada."
The two Wikipedias give a similar definition for "forced disappearance," but it's interesting to note that Wiktionary actually gives different definitions for "desaparecidos" for English and Spanish. In Spanish, the term is defined in a more generic way as referring to a person who has disappeared or is missing. But the English definition of "desaparecidos" is much more specific: "One of the people who disappeared during the 1976-1983 military rule in Argentina, presumed to have been killed by members of the regime." Maybe this is kind of a pedestrian observation, but since "desaparecido" is a Spanish word that can be used in a number of ways within Spanish, it requires disambiguation; In English, its only real meaning has to do with the abduction and murder of dissenters under dictatorial regimes in Central and South America during the late 20th century.
The two articles are different structurally. The Spanish article (over 10,000 words) is about twice as long as the English (about 5,000 words). The Spanish version has a much longer introduction, gives more figures, and discusses in more detail the international legal framework that has developed in response to the use of "disappearing" as a political strategy. The Spanish article goes into even more detail about the legal aspects and history of the issue in the body of the article, which suggests that such issues are of greater concern and interest in the Spanish-speaking world.
The main body of the English article is taken up with examples of disappearance strategies in 21 countries worldwide, only six of which are in Central and South America; each country is given a bold subhead under the main heading of "Examples." The Spanish article does discuss the Latin-American context of the problem in an extensive section, "Antecedentes en América Latina." The Spanish article devotes subheaded sections to examples in other parts of the world, but there are only eight of these.
Both the Spanish and English articles have sections about los desaparecidos in popular culture. The English article mentions about twice as many examples in film and literature.