I am both a geographer and a translator, so this is a total geek out. In English municipalities are only urban and don't usually have political units inside them (boroughs are a rare exception). Municipios are often rural, or a mix of urban and rural, quite large, and have all sorts of other units inside them (veredas, corregimientos, etc). Municipios are much more like US counties, but counties seem to be much larger in the UK so I'm not sure if the term would still hold for a UK audience. There are 48 counties in the UK; 1,122 in Colombia; and 3,007 in the US. Some Canadian provinces have counties, so it should work for Canadians. Australians used to have counties but apparently generally don't know the term today. If you're trying to reach a global English speaking audience local is another fudge option. If you are talking about, say, the unidad para las victimas del municipio, it might work to render this just as the local unit for victims.
Of course if you're translating not interpreting you can use the false cognate and include a translator's footnote - but how many people will really read and remember it?
The image here is a map of the Oct 2016 vote on the Colombian peace accord by municipio made by Carlos Felipe Reyes.
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Sure, but at some point these administrative and geographical subdivisions are more or less arbitrarily chosen by governments. What we might refer to as a state in the US would be a departamento in Colombia and a comunidad autónoma in Spain. Either way, what a coincidence that you bring this up just now--I just completed a huge conference gig where they were talking about vaccinations in the Americas and they were using municipio as municipality, so I went along with it. Keep up the great work.
I def use municipality for municipio... eg "municipal government" the question is what do you do for vereda (village?) and corregimiento ?? I'm sure those are on this blog somewhere...
they are! use the search bar in the upper left :)
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