Hosting the Gap: Digital Typography as Linguistic Hospitality in Translation
Proposal Type
Individual Talk
Location
Narratives & Worlds
Start Date
July 2026
End Date
July 2026
Abstract
Contemporary translation theory understands translation as an interpretive and transformative act, rather than a transparent transfer of meaning. Yet fluent translation is often experienced as the text itself, making the gaps, losses, and decisions that shaped it difficult to perceive. This project asks how artistic and typographic means can make translational gaps visible, felt, and readable.
At the center of the presentation is a screen based video essay developed as a laboratory for translation between Hebrew and Portuguese. The work consists of moving multilingual text, where translated phrases appear, shift, compress, separate, delay, and fall out of sync in response to specific gaps. Rather than approaching translation as equivalence, the video essay examines what remains unstable after semantic correspondence has been achieved.
Through close examples, the presentation examines how gaps generate typographic decisions: structural condensation that cannot be reproduced, parallel terms with different emotional weights, and languages that organize intimacy or belonging differently. Compression, spacing, delay, asymmetry, and desynchronization allow the gap to be encountered as part of reading. Typography does not illustrate translation; it continues it by giving form, duration, and spatial presence to what cannot be fully carried across.
Within the context of (Un)Supervised, supervision is understood not as control over translation, but as attentive intervention in reading. Machine assisted translation appears as one stage within a broader condition: translation, whether human or automated, tends to become transparent once fluent. The artistic and ethical intervention lies in identifying what fluency conceals and composing conditions of linguistic hospitality in which the reader encounters the gaps translation usually absorbs.
The work belongs to electronic literature through its understanding of text as time based digital material. Reading takes place through movement, delay, rhythm, spacing, visual behavior, and programmed temporality. Rather than resolving misalignment, the work holds translational gaps as material conditions of reading and as sites of ethical attention.
Hosting the Gap: Digital Typography as Linguistic Hospitality in Translation
Narratives & Worlds
Contemporary translation theory understands translation as an interpretive and transformative act, rather than a transparent transfer of meaning. Yet fluent translation is often experienced as the text itself, making the gaps, losses, and decisions that shaped it difficult to perceive. This project asks how artistic and typographic means can make translational gaps visible, felt, and readable.
At the center of the presentation is a screen based video essay developed as a laboratory for translation between Hebrew and Portuguese. The work consists of moving multilingual text, where translated phrases appear, shift, compress, separate, delay, and fall out of sync in response to specific gaps. Rather than approaching translation as equivalence, the video essay examines what remains unstable after semantic correspondence has been achieved.
Through close examples, the presentation examines how gaps generate typographic decisions: structural condensation that cannot be reproduced, parallel terms with different emotional weights, and languages that organize intimacy or belonging differently. Compression, spacing, delay, asymmetry, and desynchronization allow the gap to be encountered as part of reading. Typography does not illustrate translation; it continues it by giving form, duration, and spatial presence to what cannot be fully carried across.
Within the context of (Un)Supervised, supervision is understood not as control over translation, but as attentive intervention in reading. Machine assisted translation appears as one stage within a broader condition: translation, whether human or automated, tends to become transparent once fluent. The artistic and ethical intervention lies in identifying what fluency conceals and composing conditions of linguistic hospitality in which the reader encounters the gaps translation usually absorbs.
The work belongs to electronic literature through its understanding of text as time based digital material. Reading takes place through movement, delay, rhythm, spacing, visual behavior, and programmed temporality. Rather than resolving misalignment, the work holds translational gaps as material conditions of reading and as sites of ethical attention.
Bio
Maya Sarfaty is a filmmaker and doctoral researcher at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon. Her artistic research examines translation as an ethical and material practice, focusing on multilingual testimony, linguistic friction, digital typography, and the reading experience. She is the creator of Mothers Cry in the Same Language, an ongoing large scale screen based typographic project exploring multilingual grief and coexistence without linguistic unification. Her current research includes a video essay exploring typographic responses to translational friction between Hebrew and Portuguese. Her films have premiered internationally, including at IDFA and the Venice Film Festival.