For this project we created an experimental translation of the book Vox Fibrae by Carole Simard-Laflamme and François Tousignant
Meeting Wednesday 9th of October
During our first meeting we went around the room and had everyone introduce themselves and their work. We had gathered a good interdisciplinary group with people from three departments and four programs. We explained the goal of our research group and defined the members as the organising committee of our event on November 20th. Then we decided what the theme of the performance would be, we had outline three possible topics: difference, translation and power dynamics. One of the members had been working on translation: translating language into cloth and translating verbal memories into physical objects. One of our founding members, Adriana, was also working in translation and was editor of a translation magazine so we quickly identified this theme as the most appropriate one. We all gathered our knowledge on the topic of translation and described projects we were working on which could incorporate this topic. One of our members then described a text she was working on which she couldn’t translate, it was a text on translation and textiles which was only available in French, we decided that for the next meeting we would create a group translation as some of us could speak some french, but none of us are very confident French speakers. We concluded the meeting with this plan for the next meeting.
Meeting Wednesday October 23rd, 2019
During our second meeting we started on the translation of Vox Fibrae. We had scanned a couple of pages to make it easier for everyone to have access to the work. We noticed how the scanned pages gave the book a different feel. The physical book is very wide, so it is difficult to look at the whole page at once, while the digital version makes it easy to resize the open book to fit within the width of the screen. Being able to scroll through the open book provided an overview of what the work would be about, in a way the physical book had not prepared us for. We started off with the first page, going around the room, adding whatever translation we could. We usually started with the person with the lowest proficiency. French and English are similar enough that not a lot of prior knowledge is necessary to be able to dig out a few translations. There were some words and wordplays we couldn’t place our finger on. The language of the book moves between the language of music and fibres in a way that required us to really mull over each word to figure out how to provide the best translation.
Meeting Wednesday November 6th, 2019
For this meeting we moved to one of the middle pages of the book. We picked this page because it had more writing than any of the previous pages. We quickly noticed it was made up of both Italian and French words. The Italian words in particular were music terms. As one of our group members was from the music department, this added an extra layer of translation. We went through the list of words, trying to find their translation and connection.
At the end of the session a native French speaker joined the group to provide extra insight. This, however, did not make things that much easier. Some of the words were still unknown to the native speaker, and the connections we had thought we made seemed to no longer work. We were suddenly pulled to the reality of what the text was saying and had difficulty fitting it into the translation which we had created, making us question the process of translation.
