Übersetzung/Translation/Traduction

In this work, conceived in 1968 and realised in 1974, Timm Ulrichs has a German text translated into 24 foreign languages by sworn translators, with each translation being translated into the next language by the following translator, unaware of the German source text, before the 25th translation (from Hindi) is retranslated into German. The “language cycle” goes once around the world – from the Romance to the Slavic and Semitic languages to Chinese and Japanese and back to German. T.U. uses the lexical definition of the term “Übersetzung” from the 1957 edition of the Großer Brockhaus as the source text. The language game corresponds to the “Chinese Whispers” scheme, in which a spoken sentence becomes completely devoid of meaning in the course of the communication chain – comparable to the devaluation of a sum of money after many exchanges into other currencies (as in T.U.’s parallel series of experiments “Money/Exchange/Money”).