Funny Translate
2025
Screenshot of a live translation app during my residency in Berlin. Funny Translate documents a mundane yet revealing moment where technology stumbles over language. Through a simple screen recording, the video captures the poetic glitches of a real-time translation app as it tries—and fails—to decode German signs into English. What should be a functional, utilitarian process becomes a series of humorous misinterpretations, phonetic slips, and visual errors that expose the fragility of automated systems when faced with the intricacies of human language. This minimal gesture—pointing the camera, awaiting the translation, recording the failure—highlights how absurdity and accident also generate meaning. The video does not mock technology, but rather uses it as a lens to observe our own cultural, linguistic, and perceptual limitations. In a hyper-translated world, Funny Translate celebrates the beauty of not fully understanding.
AI Context
AI is used by Google’s real-time translation application.
Alejandro Thornton
Argentina
Bio
Alejandro Thornton holds a Bachelor’s degree in Visual Arts, and is a teacher and researcher at the Department of Visual Arts at the National University of the Arts (U.N.A.). His work in visual poetry has been published in numerous magazines and in anthologies such as “El punto Ciego” (2007), “Poéticas Oblicuas (2016), “Proporción Aurea” (2023), and “Visual Poetry. An Argentine and Brazilian anthology” (2023). In 2022, he won the III International Visual Poetry Award Paqui Jimenez Yepez (Spain).