electronic literature translation

Over a year and a half ago, a group of scholars, programmers, artists and translators started working on a research project focusing on the translation of various works of electronic literature, ranging from e-poetry (Maria Mencia’s The Poem That Crossed the Atlantic), digital database (Luís Lucas Pereira’s Machines of Disquiet), installation (Søren Pold et al’s The Poetry Machine), digital aurature (digital language art in programmable aurality) (John Cayley’s The Listeners) and hyperfiction (Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story). In order to identify common and divergent issues depending on the genres, formats and languages of the works under study, they were all examined through the prism of the following concepts: Translinguistic translation (translation between languages), Transcoding (translation between machine-readable codes and between machine-readable codes and human-readable text), Transmedial translation (translation between medial modalities), and Transcreation (translation as a shared creative practice).

 One of the recurring questions raised throughout the project was: how interventionist/creative should our translation/remediation be as we are also touching upon the very materiality of the works? A current theme has been to combine the cybertextual or software dimensions with the textual, semantic dimensions and to discuss translation as much as a translation of processes as the (finished) product of a particular tradition of translinguistic practice. Some of the theoretical terms for this has been the concept of electronic tropes, “radical mediation” (Richard Grusin), and how different languages relate to each other in ways that cannot be revealed. With Walter Benjamin, we could also ask whether translation is “merely a preliminary way of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages to each other,” including the question of code in our reflection.

 This roundtable will give the members of the project the opportunity to share their observations on their collective endeavors; bridging the gap between the practice-based approach and a theoretical perspective on the task of translating electronic literature. In addition to a brief presentation of each work and the specific challenges they raised, the participants will offer key insights into the collective methodologies elaborated throughout the duration of the project.

Stephanie Strickland's and Nick Montfort's See and Spar Between is in many respects a translational challenge that in some languages might seem an impossible task. Polish, our target language, imposes some serious constraints: one- syllable words become disyllabic or multisyllabic; kennings have different morphological, lexical and grammatical arrangement, and most of the generative rhetoric of the original (like anaphors) must take into consideration the grammatical gender of Polish words. As a result, the javascript code, instructions that accompany the javascript file, and arrays of words that this poetry generator draws from, need to be expanded and rewritten. Moreover, in several crucial points of this rule-driven work, natural language forces us to modify the code. In translating Sea and Spar Between, the process of negotiation between the source language and the target language involves more factors than in the case of traditional translation. Strickland and Montfort read Dickinson and Melville and parse their readings into a computer program (in itself a translation, or port, from Python to javascript) which combines them in almost countless ways. This collision of cultures, languages and tools becomes amplified if one wants to transpose it into a different language. This transposition involves the original authors of Sea and Spar Between, the four original translators of Dickinson and Melville into Polish, and us, turning into a multilayered translational challenge, something we propose to call a distributed translation. While testing the language and the potential of poetry translation in the digital age, the experiment – we hope – has produced some fascinating and thought-provoking poetry.