Learning to write

Series of three-paper sets with a companion book, butter paper, text, office pins
12cm x 20cm, 2022

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.

A companion book to the three-paper-sets where I invited people to occupy an uncomfortable translation state for a bit, and write their answers in a language they don’t speak well or have not used in a long time. It had questions taken from a language learning website offering peer corrections and I was using it for learning French. I was corrected in English, French and even Hindi, and this project records these different  zones of translation and learning where the mother tongue becomes foreign in the process.

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