“言葉 / Kot wahr” by Yoko Tawada with Bettina Brandt

Yoko Tawada is a bilingual writer who works at the intersection of Japanese and German. Excerpted here is one of her experiments in "surface translation," a mode of translation that only carries over the sound of a text (Anglophone readers might be more familiar with the term "homophonic translation"). Hence the rendering of 言葉 (words) into Kot wahr (excrement true), and 口 (mouth) into Kutsche (carriage). For Tawada, translation is not the transmission of meaning and information. Translation is the cadence of two languages bleeding into each other. —Jein Han

Yoko Tawada, with Bettina Brandt. "言葉 / Kot wahr," from "Überseezungen: Transcultural Language Games," February 10, 2006 at the University of Arizona. Watch the full performance on Voca.