< Learning to write >

When we learn to write in a new language, we access our mother tongue through a new foreign space. The gaps are where the two languages meet and wear the constant familiarity and foreignness of each other. The questions in this book are taken from a language learning website that offers peer corrections, and are some of the very first questions that one encounters when they are learning to think in their target language; about their hobbies, things that bring them joy, how they orient themselves in the world. Some of these questions are intimate, some mundane, some silly, some that no one wants to answer. In a new language encounter, all these questions enter an unknown space, as if they are being heard for the very first time, as one did in their childhood where one learns through repetition of sounds, and meaning is optional.

I wrote answers to these questions in French, and was given corrections by various people in French, English and Hindi. Through these series of translations, I encountered the foreign nature of my mother tongue. I invited the visitors to occupy the uncomfortable translation state, and write their own answers, in a language they don’t speak well, that they are learning, or have not used in a long time, leaving their answers open to be read, to be corrected, to be in the company of others.

The third page of each book is machine translated with an online translator, which includes the corrections by native speakers. Machine translation can translate multiple European languages well sometimes, but when I introduce Hindi or Punjabi, it starts to produce repetitions and mistakes that are entirely new and give new meanings to the text. It is also relatively good at translating between English-Hindi, English-Punjabi, but it fails when it is Hindi-Punjabi. It is these unknown zones within machine and human translation that this work exists in.