“The only way to communicate is to understand what it is like not to understand…it is at that moment that you make something understandable” – Richard Saul Wurman. 

There is a language of design and there is a language of things, but what is the language of language? When we ask this question to ourselves as ever evolving, migrating beings, we realize that the language of translation surpasses the bounds of paper and enters the world of actions, gestures, expressions, sounds and all things tangible.

Myriam Suchet has said that “the discourse that we have about translation represents it as a bridge and makes us believe that there are two shores- the departure shore and the target shore, but if we actually look at the practice of translation, discovering the source and target language – the water between them is not so easy.” 

In this experimental project undertaken during the exchange semester, there was an attempt to juxtapose Indic Scripts on French Phonetics. The idea was to create a pocket book that will educate two segments of people at the same time. It was attempt to bridge the gap between languages and play with the concept of translation. While one segment learns about a script, The other learns about phonetics. 

It was also a project that addressed broader concerns of language and culture. The contextual implications of a language and the idea of migration to merge the two.