Böhmische Dörfer, 2004

Goethe-Institut Prague, Futura Gallery Prague

This media performance is a work-in-progress presentation based on real-time translations by an early online translation program in 2004. Written texts by contemporary German and Czech authors functioned as data set for the performance with two actors on stage. The performance starts with a ‘sound carpet’ of audio data, generated through the early text-to-speech application. Several of the texts are subsequently online-live-translated by the translation machine from German to Czech and projected on the computer screen for the audience to read. By a copy/paste method, the texts were subsequently translated back and forth between German and Czech several times so that errors exponentially increased. A Czech and a German performer (Stepanka Simlova and Achim Mohné) read the different texts (original – translation – back-translation) like a dialogue in their respective mother tongues. They ‘interpreted’ the texts by acting them out according to the “transformation of their content through the translation”.

Furthermore, as part of the performance, several fragments of generated, translated text were entered online into the text-to-speech program to 'read it' out loud by the computer voice. Since a Czech version of text-to-speech did not exist at the time, the Czech texts were entered in German pronunciation, thus subverting the program. Stepanka Simlova finally dictated the Czech sentences to Achim Mohné in ‘phonetic transcription’ so that the pronunciation was understandable but with a German accent.

The sound documents of the computer-read verses were then played live. Silent video clips that related thematically interrupted the actions of reading. In addition to that, the Czech writer Jara Rudis with his group 'Collaps' improvised translations of his own poems, which were read aloud from the projection.