Translation for Dummies: How to Play That Translation Game!

This past Thursday I had the chance to play That Translation Game for the first time. Considering that I didn’t really understand it until playing it, I should probably explain the game in a little more detail. You play That Translation Game through an iPad network, with one person as the judge of translations and others playing as contestants. The purpose of the game is to come up with the best translation; you could be translating text, images, or even video (which is a lot harder than it sounds). Still don’t understand it? That’s okay; I didn’t either when the game was explained. Not until I was behind the iPad typing did I fully understand the purpose.

When playing the game our class was divided into groups and each group received an iPad, of course I was the first to get the iPad in my group. I was terrified of not creating a good translation, because I still didn’t know what that meant. Our first task, my favorite, was to translate the first few lines of the Odyssey. When I read over the lines again, I quickly came up with an idea of how to translate the line. The Odyssey begins with asking a Muse to tell of the story of Odysseus, and my first instinct was to portray it as storytelling.

While writing my translation, I took cues from Princess Bride, the Grandfather telling an exciting story to his Grandson, highly exaggerations and most of all fun. This made me realize that translations aren’t necessarily from one language to another, or even word for word. Translation can also be into different registers, they can be serious or parodies, geared to children or professors, and all of these are valid translations! When it came to judging, and it was mentioned that my translation seemed very Princess Bride-esque was my happiest moment while playing the game, because I knew I had achieved my goal and criteria. But the judging round also brought lots of confusion.

When going around the room to explain everyone’s translation, we realized that everyone took very different approaches to their translation. This made it very hard to judge the translations and decide who was the winner, because everyone had their own criteria of what made a good translation. In the following rounds we created criteria for all of our translations to meet, yet it was still difficult because all our translations were different interpretations. Although I really enjoyed the game in the sense that it got everyone in the class thinking creatively, I don’t think it is an easy game to judge. The only time I see it being straightforward enough to judge is if you were actually translating form one language to another. Although in my perspective the judging is nearly impossible and subjective, for the most part this game was very useful for our translation class, we are meant to think of translation in many ways (#?/22), and it definitely took me out of the normal Google translate mindset!

Mary Hirt