  We study the emergence of Nambu-Goldstone modes due to broken translation
symmetry in field theory. Purely spontaneous breaking yields a massless phonon
which develops a mass upon introducing a perturbative explicit breaking. The
pseudo-phonon mass agrees with Gell Mann-Oakes-Renner relations. We analyze the
simplest possible theories featuring gradient Mexican hats and describing
space-dependent order parameters. We comment on homogeneous translation
breaking and the connections with holographic Q-lattices.
