Tweetranslating Trump: Outranspo's “bad translations” of Trump's tweets

ABSTRACT

Outranspo is a group of international translators, scholars, and writers who work playfully in-between languages. They belong to the tradition of the Ou-X-Po groups who have followed (in our case rebelliously) in the model of Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle), except instead of the “li” in “Oulipo” (which stands for Littérature) we have replaced it with Translation. Our full name, Outranspo, spells out “Ouvroir de Translation Potencial.” We have applied the “translation with constraints method” to a number of Donald Trump's Tweets. The results are both playful and enlightening.

KEYWORDS:

• Outranspo
• Oulipo
• translation
• Trump
• tweeting

Notes

1. For a great discussion on this, see Lyn Hejinian's article, “Barbarism.” The Language of Inquiry. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. 325–326.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Camille Bloomfield

Camille Bloomfield teaches expression and communication at Université Paris 13. She conducts literary research on Oulipo, avant-garde, manifestoes digitized heritage, and platforms for collaborative translation. She translates from English and Italian into French. She recently published Raconter l'Oulipo. Histoire et sociologie d'un groupe-monde (Honoré Champion, 2017). She is a co-founder of Outranspo.

Lily Robert-Foley

Lily Robert-Foley is Associate Professor of Translation Studies at the University of Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3. She is the author of Jiji, a novel in prose poems and conceptual writing (Omnia Vanitas Press, 2016), Money, Math and Measure (Essay Press chapbook series, 2016), m, a book of poetry-critique-collage (Corrupt Press, 2013), and graphemachine, a chapbook of visual poetry (Xerolage, 2013). She is a member of Outranspo, an international group of experimental translators.