Special Subject: Design — Bad Translation: Expanded Typography and Publication

UG: 4.s00 | G: 4.s12

In his essay, “The Task of the Translator,” Walter Benjamin writes: “it is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.” The same can be said of the typographic designer who must give an idea visual form: form beholden to the syntactic constraints of whatever shape it must materialize in, whether as a series of marks etched into stone, a block of text living in the codex, or a pixel activated on a screen. How does the grammar behind tool and substrate set the rules for translation? When do these translations fail, and why—and what do those failures generate instead? How can translations, good and bad, productively challenge an idea’s core?

Part visual language study, part workshop, this class will iterate around translation as method and practice for typographic experimentation. Using language as an organizing framework and structure, students will engage with calligraphic form, modular alphabets, and notational conventions and experiment with 1:1 translations, direct transpositions, and transliterations. By the end of the term, students will have researched and developed a project that translates a known and observed system into a visual language of their own creation. This will be supplemented by theoretical writing from artists, writers, and technologists that may include Ferdinand de Saussure, Walter Benjamin, Albrecht Dürer, Donald Knuth, Charles Gaines, Tan Lin, Louis Lüthi, Édouard Glissant, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Students can expect to learn basic typographic rules and typesetting techniques.