Wednesday, April 01, 2009

Fångad i någons garn


I got back to Umea just in time for the HUMlab Open Day. Charlene and I spent the afternoon inviting people to help translate the Yarn Text into Swedish. It was quite a challenge due to the poetic metaphor of 'yarn' in the Raqs Media Collective's original. But fortunately there are several HUMlab workers who are experts in the language of both craft and code, and were happy to advise. The word 'yarn / garn' didn't translate the idea of a story in Swedish, so we had to be creative. So we used a Swedish saying 'to weave a story', which made more sense than the literal translation of 'to spin a yarn'. But in some cases 'Tråd' made a poetic computing metaphor. For example, the last line is translated as 'That's why Threads (Trådar) make good kernals.' Sadly we didn't manage to squeeze in my favourite saying - tangled up in yarn = 'Fångad i någons garn'.

Charlene also made a great display illustrating the relationship between pixels and cross stitch, and Suzanne showed her Knitted Flat Screen cover.

No comments: