News

26 Exchanges Reception - September 2009

Members of Temple's in-house translation team attended a reception for the 26 Exchanges exhibition run by our charity partner, International PEN, in conjunction with 26, Pentagram and UNESCO. This is a project which grew out of the Free the Word festival 2009 and twinned 26 members with PEN members from around the world to translate a text and tell the story of its journey in translation.

This mesmerising work designed by Harry Pearce of Pentagram and Sanky from All of Us is an innovative digital installation which brings to life the challenges faced by translators. Extracts of the texts and correspondence between the writers are presented through expressive typography and voice recordings projected in a darkened room. The result is a hypnotising interpretation of the translation process, which 26 founder John Simmons describes as a way of "making a bridge that two writers can walk across from different sides."

The work can be seen in Paris in October as part of the UNESCO international conference on translation.