Traduire en archipel(s): Translating the City and Performing Translation in the Digital Era

In this chapter, I will present the exhibition Traduire en archipel(s), held at CREA Cantieri del Contemporaneo in Venice in April 2023, as a form of artistic performance of experiential translation of the city of Venice. This project was born directly out of my practice of creative translation training, which includes intersemiotic translation through an experiential approach and out of my research on the concept of translating the city, and the creative role of errors in human and machine translation, with a focus on finding possible translations of the translated and in-translation city of Venice in particular. In the first section, I introduce the theoretical background of my research on these topics, exploring my understanding and my practice of intersemiotic and experiential translation, as a form of exploration of all the possibilities offered by the original, in contrast with the perception of translation as simple reproduction. In the second section of the article, I describe and analyze the works of my research-creation artistic project Translating the City: Venice 2.023 in the context of the exhibition Traduire en archipel(s), using ludic forms of intersemiotic translation to generate an embodied experience of the city through the “translator’s gaze” (Campbell and Vidal, 2019), and I clarify how these works fit within the theoretical background I have outlined. The last section is dedicated to a discussion of how intersemiotic translation activities related to the exhibition have been integrated in an advanced MA course in translation I teach at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, to understand how this approach to translation can be fruitfully put at the service of translation training in the classroom, exposing students to a more complex and richer experience of translation.