renderings

Renderings – a project devoted to the translation of e-lit works into English. The poster is devoted to the Renderings project established at MIT at the Trope Tank lab headed by Nick Montfort. As the project's website explains: "The Renderings project focuses on translating highly computational and otherwise unusual literature into English. [The participants] not only employ established literary translation techniques, but also consider how computation and language interact." The poster defines and explains basic terms and phenomena relevant to the project, like highly computational literature, expressive processing, and platform studies, and presents the specifics of chosen genres of electronic literature. It discusses the general principles of the project (organizational structure, languages, direction of the translation, types of works included) and the anatomy of chosen e-lit works. The main part of the poster is a step by step analysis of the translation process, which involves not only the level of text, familiar to literary translation, but also the way computational processes function and are programmed. The analysis draws from the methodology developed by the fields of code studies, platform studies and expressive processing. The poster is prepared collaboratively by the group of researches and translators affiliated with the Renderings project.

The point of departure for this article is the Renderings project (http://trope-tank.mit.edu/renderings/) established in 2014 and developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in a laboratory called the Trope Tank. The goal of the project is to translate highly computational and otherwise unusual digital literature into English. Translating digital works that are implemented as computer programs presents new challenges that go beyond the already difficult ones tackled by translators of more typical forms of literature. It is a type of translation akin to the translation of experimental, conceptual, or constrained works. It is not unusual for this task to require the translator or translators to reinvent the work in a new linguistic and cultural context, and sometimes also to port the original program to another programming language. This article describes an undertaking related to the broadly understood discipline of creative computing and studies the work of the translator as taking place both in code and language, drawing from the methodologies developed by the fields of code studies, platform studies, and expressive processing.

(Source: Authors' Abstract)