The What

Inspired largely by The Palestinian Youth Movement’s communal translation of Trinity of Fundamentals from Arabic to English, I am eager to create a platform where diasporic communities can upload existing texts and work on their translations in community. 

A lot of software translation tools seem primarily concerned with translation at scale – translating many texts, or into many languages, or crowdsourcing translations, or building translational memory over many different translations. This proposal differs fundamentally in that it is concerned with the pedagogy of communal translation – creating a place for members to work and decide on translations together, and treating the process of translation as its own important text. 

Last semester for an Introduction to Translation course, I wrote a paper that examined translation theories of “diaspora as translation” and “translation as pedagogy,” and applied them to the specifics of Afghan linguistic and literary contexts. 

For the fourteen work weeks of this praxis course, the focus will be on building and deploying a prototype tool that allows users to:

• upload a static document
• create an associated document where they collaborate on a translation of the original document
• add comment threads on the translation

The How

The Team

• Alex Millatmal – Lead developer responsible for:
  • back-end, API, and rich-text editor schema development
  • co-defining front-end and other development tasks
• OPEN – (1) UI/UX developer responsible for working — primarily with React (JavaScript library) and CSS — on implementing designs and fine-tuning usability of the software
• OPEN – (1) Project manager responsible for:
  • posting weekly team updates to the class blog
  • overseeing that each deliverable’s work stream remains on track and removing any obstacles to work
• OPEN – (1) Designer responsible for researching existing comparable software examples, finalizing wireframes, and defining UI/UX requirements

The following roles are smaller in scope and can be distributed among the above team members:

• User tester responsible for quality assurance of the software as it is built and deployed
• Researcher responsible for learning and advising on best technical practices for features like file uploading, text editor support across languages, etc.

Project Timeline

I propose we work in two-week sprints over the course of the semester:

1. Feb 10 – 23
   • project scope definition
   • research
   • wire-framing
2. * Feb 24 – Mar 9
   • development phase 1 (technical foundations)
3. * Mar 10 – 23
   • development phase 1 (technical foundations)
   • paper outlining and drafting
4. * Mar 24 – Apr 6
   • user testing of deployed prototype
   • paper outlining and drafting
5. Apr 7 – 20
   • development phase 2 (refining UI; additional features)
6. Apr 21 – May 4
   • development phase 2 (refining UI; additional features)
7. May 5 – 18
   • dress rehearsal
   • project polishing
   • finalize paper
   • showcase!

* denote sprints taking place over Ramadan

The Why

The idea for this academic exploration came from on of my WhatsApp group chats. A question about what translation means to our Afghan diasporic community turned into a sprawling conversation about: who is translated (and why and by whom); what texts we would like to read more closely and the barriers to accessing them; the inspiration of Palestinians learning political theory from their own history; and the way that the family archive pushes us to connect with and learn our heritage languages. As is often the case with this tenor of conversation, each participant had a piece of the puzzle — one had access to hard-to-find texts, another had time to scan the documents, another had language fluency, another had contact with elders doing regular work on translation projects. 

What would it mean for us Afghans (and other communities) in diaspora to learn from our own textual histories through the act of communal translation?

Beyond this semester, I’m interested in applying and extending these ideas as a means of moving beyond the static nature of the digital archive, which I find frustrating and limiting. For the kinds of technology and computing we have at our disposal, is the most transformative thing we can do with the archive to digitize and disseminate its materials? Following diaspora studies scholar Ipek Demir, what does it mean for the agency of the archival subject — particularly the kind of dual-subject of the diasporic viewer — to be able to translate, interpret, and annotate archival materials in-place, to make meaning against the archival grain?

Working at the level of software also allows us to think about translation choices at the very granular levels of words, annotations, texts, and hyper texts. I have professional software engineering background working in rich-text editors and content management systems, and deeply enjoy the philosophical exercise of thinking about how to model the data that supports content and its various metadata in ways that bring functionality to the document that is uniquely-achieved in a digital realm. From an academic perspective, I’m interested in the ways these additional layers of functionality and metadata open up possibilities for multiplicities of meaning in the documents themselves, and how interaction with the documents can become their own important texts and sites of cross-generational exchange and education.