After getting a little taste of That Translation Game in class last Wednesday, I wasn’t sure how much fun it would be in discussion the next day. There were several technical difficulties that made starting the game rather difficult. People kept having to force quit and relaunch the app. I honestly didn’t think it would work for us in discussion. Fortunately, my assumption was wrong.  We were able to play three rounds of That Translation Game with little trouble; and I must admit, I really did enjoy it.

When you launch the app you have to choose an alias and a game show avatar. Then you join a game that your host has created and begin playing. The host is able to choose the level of difficulty and also whether you will be translating text, an image, or a video. The host adjusts the amount of time you will have for the question, and your team must come up with your translation in that allotted time. When all of the teams have finished there is a vote to see who had the best translation, but ultimately the host will decide the winner.

During Round 2 we were asked to translate a few lines from the Tower of Babel story. My team decided that we needed to rethink how to translate this text, since we had discussed and translated it many times this semester. Instead of giving a word for word translation that sounded more modern, we decided to connect our translation to this class. It mentioned how God realized that in the future the University of Michigan would be unable to offer the course “22 Ways to Think About Translation,” so he decided to confound the people’s language. Everyone in the room liked it and we ended up winning the round.

This exercise helped me realize that translation isn’t just a word for word conversion from one language to the next. Depending on who the translator is, there could be thousands of translations of the same story. What is important is that the translation is of high quality. This means that people are able to understand it and receive a message. You can be as creative as you want with your translations, as long as others are able to understand them and see a connection in the before and after.

Having a new understanding of translation made me wonder, how often do we translate in everyday life? Do we even know we’re translating? I’m not sure what the answers to these questions are, but I have a feeling that people (especially monolingual people) are using translation much more than they think they are.

Layla Taha