Renderings (poster)

Renderings – a project devoted to the translation of e-lit works into English. The poster is devoted to the Renderings project established at MIT at the Trope Tank lab headed by Nick Montfort. As the project's website explains: "The Renderings project focuses on translating highly computational and otherwise unusual literature into English. [The participants] not only employ established literary translation techniques, but also consider how computation and language interact." The poster defines and explains basic terms and phenomena relevant to the project, like highly computational literature, expressive processing, and platform studies, and presents the specifics of chosen genres of electronic literature. It discusses the general principles of the project (organizational structure, languages, direction of the translation, types of works included) and the anatomy of chosen e-lit works. The main part of the poster is a step by step analysis of the translation process, which involves not only the level of text, familiar to literary translation, but also the way computational processes function and are programmed. The analysis draws from the methodology developed by the fields of code studies, platform studies and expressive processing. The poster is prepared collaboratively by the group of researches and translators affiliated with the Renderings project.