The collaborative translation laboratory “Toward a Lexicon of Usership” (2013)

The collaborative translation laboratory of Stephen Wright’s book “Toward a Lexicon of Usership” (2013) started at Can Serrat Art Residency during November 2017, the project will continue its itinerary through other production centers in Catalunya: La Escocesa (22, 23 and 26th of January 2018) and AcVic (27 and 28th of January 2018) are already schedule.

“In four Sunday-afternoon sessions over the course of November at Can Serrat, we set out to test and verify a bold and untried hypothesis: that to read a text is, in essence, to translate, counter translate and retranslate that text. That would mean that the robust use of a text — really reading it — would be to bring it quite literally into life and words in a different language. None (or few) of us were expert translators; none had the time to actually translate a book, but that was just the point: the desire to read works together, allowed a translation (in fact, two translations) to emerge without work actually taking place!

Over the coming months, beginning in mid-January, we will pursue these open wiki-translation laboratories in different formats and sites, opening them to different userships, but at the same time relying on a core group of committed users, who have been engaged since the beginning and may be asked to oversee the final version, which is to be published both digitally and in a paper edition in the Spring of 2018.”

Stephen Wright