Individual Project - The Non-similar Similar

What I want with this experiment is to show that without the creativity of the translator and without his/her own input, the poem becomes similar but almost unreadable.

I made English alphabets by using Arabic alphabets with the purpose of making them look similar to the Arabic text.

I then translated a few Arabic poems that I have written using google translate and typed them using these letters (or font). Finally I used a - text to audio - reader to accompany the poems to remove the human aspect from it even more.

The non similar similar

'An imitator must see to it that what he writes is similar but not the very same' (Jackson, 2003). " Thus a good translation discovers the "dynamics" of poetry, if not necessarily its "mechanics" (Kopp, 1998) . Critics have adopted Robert's Frost's declaration that 'poetry is what gets lost in translation' and took it for granted for the longest time. I don't believe it is lost but re-found in a different body with a new soul. It's a reincarnation carried out by the re-writer who is interpreting the poem as well as translating it literally. The re-writer becomes the creator of the new poem. The idea is similar but the poem is not.

My experiment consists of inserting an Arabic poem (written by me) into Google Translate which is a free online language translation service that instantly translates text. The purpose of this is to avoid any human/emotional influence in the translation and keep it strictly literal.

What I want with this experiment is to put these two poems -the original and the translated- in a graphical form and show that without the creativity of the translator and without his/her own input, the poem becomes similar but almost unreadable.