When first reading the manifestos I didn't know how to react to the statements and the thoughts they were presenting. I enjoyed how each thought was bullet pointed so they became separate ideas but that actual writing left me confused. The statements seemed all the same since they used a lot of reception in the manifestos and I tend to skim the first time I was introduced to a reading so that process became more difficult. The term “ultra translation” didn't make sense to me but parts around it did so I tried to piece together my own understanding of the word using context from the rest of the statements.After reading both manifestos I came to understand that my lack of understanding was ok and that not knowing was not taking away from my understand but allowing me to feel the thoughts made the manifestos through my own personal experience of trying to decode it. A statement made by Antena in A Manifesto for Ultratranslations says “We are opposed to translation, as it seeks to stitch innumerable disparate words and ideas and divides together as if they had always been fused” stood out to me cause it seemed very relevant at that point in the reading. The idea that writing and language that come to easy to use and leaves us with no curiosity is not what we want to shown, we want to struggle and discover new ideas or perspective from our lack of understanding. Something that is perfectly translated takes us the reader out of the equation and makes us feel very limited. Further Antena says in her other writing A Manifesto for Discomfortable writing that “we write discernible because we are probably wrong, yet compelled to learn. To learn from error” Which ties the ideas together and shows that we desire to make new learnings and feel a lack of purpose when given to us to easy.
The idea of using failure and and discomfort really tied me to my own personal experience of learning Chinese in high school.Everything I learned was new and complicated but my constant unknowing of Chinese and the Chinese culture made me more interested in continuing to learn. It was something I didn't understand, even when i left class knowing less then I entered with i still kept a consistent curiosity the entire time i was learning. I decided to use the limited Chinese that I still know and use it in my response to show the idea of discomfort and lack of translation pushing one's curiosity to try to understand for themselves.Since i haven't studied in a while and my brain takes some to process the translation that i tend to make my own understandings. Te Chinese writing system is also done through characters in oppose to an alphabet so the character themselves mean their own word which can add confusion when u recognize a few characters but don't understand the rest of the context so ur overall understanding of the statement is way off. I used google translate because I think it's a perfect form of trying to over translate words with a lack of understanding and getting new wrong ideas in the end. Because google translate does not fully understand the statement being made with characters in relation to each other the machine will divide each character and make up its own new meaning from that. I decided to use the Poem by Robert Frost A Road not Taken in my analysis because its well know poem that people have seen many times, but once you put it through google translate it becomes something new.
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