Untranslatables - A Guide To Translingual Dialogue

Project developed within As_Tide

Artists Yolanda de los Bueis, Elisa Marchesini, Christoph Schwarz, Sarah Vanhee developed "Untranslatables - A Guide To Translingual Dialogue" within UNIDEE - University of Ideas 2008.

"Untranslatables - A Guide To Translingual Dialogue” is not a dictionary. It is not an encyclopaedia. It is not a language course, a grammar book or linguistic research: it is an imaginary word universe that shows gaps and (im) possibilities. It reflects the inability to name everything there is, and the indomitable human desire to do so. It is a colourful answer to the grey zone in our daily vocabularies.

"Dear reader, with this book, we want to propose to you an adoption. An adoption of thirty-three different words from various languages spoken in Europe that are easy to pronounce and recognize, and that carry the potential to become both real and immaterial ambassadors of “translingual” dialogue. By accepting this new word from the source, untreated, with its own pronunciation, a real cultural transfer takes place.

The symbolic value of this is immense; the acceptance of this word into your daily vocabulary means: I choose to “absorb” one element – historical, semantic, emotional –
from another cultural background directly into mine, since this element emblemizes an entire world, bringing with it an idea for which there is simply no word in my language.
The process of trans-cultural communication – including all the misunderstandings! – is a continuous creation in itself, as every conversation in any context is a search for a kind of “creation”, for a mutual understanding, and for an agreement on the reality we live in. By talking to each other, we try to share our universes. Language has the power to unite or separate people, to clarify or confuse relations, to widen or shorten our view on the world.

When the main language in a discussion is international offshore English, the situation often arises that the participants are simply not able to translate a word of their own native language fully and sufficiently – and consequently communicate their message – in English, or in any other chosen common language. Our need for a research on “the untranslatable” derives directly from those situations. This “untranslatable” we see as a kind of “Zwischenraum”: a space in between, a poetic gap, a potentiality for interpretation and meaning, as well as a catalyst to provoke a reflection on linguistic equalities and power structures. We are a generation who have been brought up with the idea of a “united Europe”. As teenagers, we had to study a new map of Europe every year, since frontiers were repeatedly vanishing or changing. It seems that in the last few years the EU made efforts to create equality and connections between the countries go hand in hand with a growing awareness of the own – national – identity of its members.

One can notice the need throughout Europe to maintain the own language and culture, both for people who are born there, and for other nations’ communities that came to live and establish themselves in the EU as a result of the economic and political climate in their own countries. By Europe we do not mean the EU or Europe as a continent, or a historical and cultural paradigm. We take the liberty of a subjective interpretation of a “Europe” that we recognize as a very alive entity, much more complex than the segregated and clear-cut definitions mentioned above. Therefore, our untranslatable words include Arabic, Japanese and American English as part of a Europe that better serves our purpose and concept of an organism that is rich, alive and constantly evolving. Without going too deeply into the political problems that language-protectionism brings with it, but without neglecting them either, we want to acknowledge the differences between the various communities living in Europe, and promote an interchange between them, thus coming to view untranslatable words rather as presents offered from one language to the others. Our process has been a bizarre and never-ending quest that is not yet finished. We have looked into several ways to “translate” the untranslatable for the reader through texts and images, and we discovered that we could come no further than to an attempt, a suggestion, a framing of a multi-layered reality by emphasizing a touch, a colour, a detail.

Since body language is still the most universal of all the languages, we have tried to express the words through a tension in between people, objects and space that can somehow be understood by everyone. It is only somehow, however, because technically speaking we should have learnt all the different languages to really understand the words properly. That is why we had to acknowledge that we could only picture the untranslatable wor(l)d one half of the way, and even then focusing on the lower, non-cerebral part of the body, the part that we use to physically place ourselves into a reality. As we position ourselves again and again, day by day, in a constantly changing way related to our constantly evolving environment, our words are just fragments in time and space, and what we really perceive will never be completely communicable, since by the time we have said."

Yolanda de los Bueis, Elisa Marchesini, Christoph Schwarz, Sarah Vanhee

www.untranslatables.net