I went into this project wanting to see how much I could distort the meaning of a single piece of text. After a little thought on how I could accomplish my goal I was reminded of a translation assignment I was given several semesters ago. The assignment required me to translate a poem from French to English, and since I had no experience with French at the time I opted to use an online translation tool, Babelfish. What I learned when I attempted this translation was that Babelfish does not take metaphorical language into account and something always seems to be lost in translation. My previous experience with Babelfish gave me the idea to see how a single paragraph would stand up to a translation gauntlet of sorts. The paragraph I chose was an excerpt from “Notion of a Yankee Parson” by George L. Clark. I found the piece by searching aimlessly through archive.org, and the reason I chose this particular paragraph is because it is rife with metaphorical language and I wanted to see Babelfish struggle. The next step was to put the excerpt through the gauntlet I had envisioned, and that is precisely what I did translating the paragraph from English to Greek, Greek to French, French to Dutch, Dutch to English, English to Russian, and finally from Russian back to English again. The end result was something completely different from the original paragraph. Portions of the paragraph hadn’t quite made it through the gauntlet and remained in a sort of inter-lingual limbo of sorts, and the parts that did come out the other end were warped beyond comprehension. The question I had to answer now was, “What do I do with this abomination?”
The answer to my question came from my love of Dadaist artwork and my previous experience with photoshop. I decided to make a collage in the same vein of Dadaist collages by using the lines of the distorted paragraph that Babelfish had spit out. I wanted the collage to reflect the breakdown in language and meaning that the paragraph had experienced and I used a number of techniques to accomplish that goal such as the use of different fonts and colors for different parts of the text. I placed the different lines in an odd relation to one another and used different distortion techniques such as the manipulation of opacity and the flipping of pieces of text. The end result of all these distortion techniques and odd placements was a visual jumble similar to the jumble experienced by reading the end result of the translation gauntlet. Overall, I was quite pleased with the outcome, and I had a blast working through this project.

For Reference here is the original paragraph and the end result of the Babelfish translation:
The optimism which is the minister's business
is not the glittering hue of hopefulness which
leads one Micawber-like to expect to pluck ripe
clusters of grapes where there is not even a vine.
George Macdonald's bright eyed little woman,
whose eyes were like a morning in June, was al-
ways saying, "Something good is waiting for you
yonder, if you will only have patience to go on
until you reach it." But even she would perhaps
lose a little of her radiant sunshine if she knew
she was living beyond her income. Cheerful-
ness is like a gold-mine beneath a threadbare car-
pet, a silver tongue speaking from a meager li-
brary, but there must be gold and intelligence
somewhere near.

L' optimism which minister' ; ? l' the risky undertaking s of n' no by color of l' to emit; hope that plug of micawber-teneinde for qu' it waits that it [madisei] a ripe number of the grapes where of n' the year of the harvest of grapes even does not exist. George Macdonald' ? s [of mpirmpilomatis] few of the woman, whom the eyes as the morning in June were, there was he speaks means already, " ? Something of the order waits far, in proportion to you you will only have a patience for jusqu' to continue; [otoy] you reached it." ? But even possibly it its number by the irradiation of hours heats in the sun smaller s' to lose; he knew qu' it lived relative to its income. Lively ontstaan it as l' echter-mijn under animal of house worsened auto' s, language in the money which d' he says; is thin [li] one, but has qu' it is necessary; there are l' as and l' information some shut portion.