Faculty of Design

Graphic Design

Omama Mahmood

The Translation Leaves Much To Be Desired

This publication is a part of a week long project that my friend Kithi and I worked on, starting Monday January 27th and ended February 1st. We wanted to question the role of designers in the context of a globalized, assimilated upbringing and the role of language [mother tongue] in diaspora.Both Kithi and I grew up in countries that our parents were not born/brought up in, Canada and Dubai respectively. This dissonance with our parents’ birthplaces was embedded deeply within us as well as our mothers and fathers, showing up in all aspects of our lives such as our behaviors, habits, and of course—Language.Our initial idea was to make a “trace the letters” book, similar to ones you would find for children or beginner language learners. But then we thought…Who are *we* to teach anyone how to write words, we’re not linguists. Still, there is something interesting about the sameness, and repetition in writing the same word over and over again to learn it, to sit there for minutes, hours even; and memorize every stroke, curve and sinch of a word, until it glides from the pen so smoothly, your fingers will never forget it. But why in our right minds would we ever want to sit there and write the same word over and over again when we have apps like Duolingo that decrease those hours into just 5-10 minutes of gamified “language learning”?? Apps like Duolingo satisfy the public’s cravings for stimulation with it’s cheezy sound effects and smoothly designed yellow starts, but at the end of the three star run, did you really learn anything, or is the meritocracy deluding you into thinking you did. These apps make impossible any sort of “lingering” that is practiced in the ritualistic process that is language learning. It is time to start ‘learning by heart again’. With this in mind, Kithi and I had to think of what words we wanted to work with. We turned to the aspects of our language that we cannot cut ourselves away from words that have snuck into our lexicon and buried itself there, refusing to leave, refusing to be translated. And when they are, Hence the title of this book: The translation leaves much to be desired. As any bi-lingual speaker knows, there are certain words we use in our everyday lives that resist any kind of translation, words that force us to stutter and find an English equivalent to, but it’s not possible. We shouldn’t have to “compensate for the lack”, rather we should use our languages unapologetically.Language, art, dance, song are the common physical enactments of cultural memory and practices like these embody that memory materially so it can live on and redefine a ‘diasporic ontology’.

“Initially conceived as a “trace the letters” book, the project evolved into a meditation on the labor of language learning. Repetition, memorization, and the physical act of writing, is lost in favor of gamified learning, this project asks: Is there a way to return to the nostalgia of “learning by heart?” ”