If you feel like I do

This project was set and practiced in Ísafjörður in 2024. I used the original text that is a letter of affection extracted from a diary. I translated the text using machine translation in a number of languages used in the town at the moment. Then I personally contacted the people who speak each language and asked for a grammatical correction. The process involved person-to-person interaction, conversation on relationships and literature, and languages.

These papers with personal corrections were exhibited on the board with some drawing depicting the environment nearby, in the middle of the field. All the papers shown on it got weathered in the end, obtained the touch of water, wind, and time.

View on the 28th Jun 2024

Using auto-translation by Google (operated on 1 Jun 2024, and 12 Jun 2024), I translated the letter into Arabic, Catalan, Chinese, Greek, Polish, Thai, and Icelandic, and then re-translated it into English. Each result produced small differences and misinterpretations. But it still holds the original emotions and a message.

I asked for help corrections from people in Ísafjörður who have each language as their mother tongue. Ιωάννα Χαριτίδου (for Greek), Sumalee, a.k.a. Noi (for Thai), Sonia Sobiech (for Polish), Swen Schmitz Coll (for Catalan), and Yiwen Chen (for Chinese(traditional)) read each text and corrected miss-used words and mended some expressions.

The work consists of printed images of auto-translation with corrections by the people along with handwritten original text in Korean, translated text in English, and Icelandic text (translated by Elísabet Gunnarsdóttir), which are in pencil on weatherproof papers. Small watercolour drawings depicting colour and details from the nature of Ísafjörður also added in between the texts.

All were displayed on the board in the middle of the field for 12 days. As the weather changed the display also changed its contents. Raindrop made the printed letters fade and left the corrected part clearer. As it was wet and blown by wind, some papers were torn and got dirt and left their time on the surfaces. Such experienced papers were removed and new drawings were added from time to time while it was there.