Translation has allowed people of different tongues to be united by the same stories. Reading “It’s enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment” in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude has resonated with me in a way that my two years of Spanish classes would render insufficient to fully grasp its original “A mi me bastaría con estar seguro de que tu y yo existimos en este momento.” Translation, however, has mostly been a privilege reserved for the literary greats.

Translation Network, the brainchild of NYU Abu Dhabi Global Academic Fellows Mohit Mandal and Claire Pershan, is a website that was developed by freshmen, Himal Shrestha and Shantanu Bhatia. The website accepts original short literary pieces that other members of the NYUAD community can peruse and translate into another language.

“[The aim is to] see long strings of translations that can get messy — maybe they’ll even be translated back to the original language to make two versions of the text in the same language,” said Pershan.

 

Pershan, who studied French literature in college and is currently learning Persian and Arabic, has always been fascinated by languages. She became passionate about this topic politically while working in the NYUAD Writing Center, a space where she tutors and facilitates student writing in English. Working with students who have different mother tongues made her realize that there wasn’t a platform to put these languages to use through creative avenues. Through this project, she wants to create a space where this resource could be celebrated and expanded, instead of being pushed aside and seen as an impediment. With 104 languages shared between its student body of around 880 students, NYUAD serves as the ideal breeding ground for such a project. Looking forward, the hope is that it becomes a resource for all NYU campuses.

“[The point is] to connect across space so that a student studying away in Florence and is working on their Italian can translate a piece while they’re there, or when they come back and appreciate the distance that they’ve traveled,” said Pershan.

The website is open to however one wants to interpret the space, whether it be by submitting one’s own work, translating, or simply reading and exploring the website.

“The space is ultimately about empathy that is created through the act of translating the work of someone else who you know is alive and a part of your community,” concluded Pershan.