by Ricarda Vidal
In spring this year Madeleine Campbell and I interviewed several of the artists who made work for the Experiential Translation exhibition. Most of the interviews were conducted on Zoom and we used the platform’s in-built recording and transcription service. At the moment I’m relistening to all the interviews because I’m working on an article about making art with translation and translating with art.
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I love listening my way through all these inspiring conversations about the processes of making, creating and translating and am taking ample notes for my article… but I’m also thoroughly enjoying the gaps and errors, the neologisms and inventions of the automatic transcripts. While these are astonishingly accurate for a narrow bandwidth of British and American accents, Zoom’s virtual ears already struggle with some of the stronger accents of native English speakers. But I, and most of the artists we interviewed, speak English as a foreign language… and that has yielded some wonderful results as the software tried to cope with our various accents. In some cases, it simply gave up and so the transcript is riddled with holes with some sentences reduced to a string of prepositions or articles. It makes for strange reading… sometimes hilarious… sometimes oddly poetic… and sometimes also inspiring.
Below I have edited some favourite bits from the transcripts into a found poem. Read it out loud. What do you hear? I’m sure you will quickly guess what Atari has to do with Delays and how water relates to Benjamin, but who is Lola Nintendo? Probably it is not so surprising that Zoom should think of video games before philosophy and poetry…
And perhaps, like me, you will be pleased that Zoom has also come up with a name for the kind of creative translation that produced the transcripts: exponential translation. That is surely worthy of further investigation.
Delays and Atari The Sunday I I was singing. Is it something? Is it more? Translation as a part of the I pretty linguistic employee artistic It's 2 sentences by water, Benjamin: Now, what does the phone say? What does it communicate? I think that they have written another gallop, This is the anesthet, you know, alcoholic train. Exponential Translation Creek I think it would have been better to to to, to So this kind of of of of, of, of of But so we we we were Ellen egg born And uprising She pushes me out At the in the Semi, at the translation of Lola Nintendo In how far was the woman still a translation? As a new kind of new kind of poem, you know. You kind of boy 3 point 3. Whatever I I I will stop talking.
Experiential Translation 
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‘2 sentences by water, Benjamin’ – an inspiring found poem!