Flower

Working Across Languages | Playing with Google Translate

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She has always wanted to be an artist, despite the challenges in life - housing insecurities, financial difficulties, and language barriers. One night, a Transcendent gave her a mysterious vase - her wish would be granted when a flower blooms out of the vase...

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花 - Flower is an electronic literature work that focuses on the challenges of being a creator whose native language is not English. Writing is hard, but it is even harder - it poses a whole new set of challenges - when English is your second language and you are residing in an English-speaking country. Thus, most of this work was originally written in Chinese and deliberately used Google Translate to get an English version. This translated English version butchered the meaning, the beauty, and the culture behind the original and stood in front of us as a vivid example of the challenges creators face in terms of translation.

However, translation is not the only challenge creators often face. Life has much more to offer - housing insecurities, financial difficulties, and cruel optimism - no matter how hard you try, hope is still vague and nowhere to be found.