Turbulence Commission: Les Belles Infidèles by Ethan Ham

[Ethan Ham]

http://www.turbulence.org/Works/belles

"Les Belles Infidèles" consists of a short story (written specifically
for this project by Benjamin Rosenbaum) that has been translated and
retranslated by more than 40 translators into 15 languages. The
project is an exploration of the story’s compounding mutation as the
translators attempt to make it work in different languages and
cultures. The term “les belles infidèles” comes from a 17th century
quip by Gilles Ménage in which he compared a set of translations to an
acquaintance of his: beautiful but unfaithful. The phrase has come to
express the tension between making a translation seem natural in the
target language versus keeping it as close as possible to the original
text.

The project’s source code is available under a GNU Affero General
Public License and the original short story can be used under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license.

Les Belles Infidèles is a 2011 commission of New Radio and Performing
Arts, Inc. for its Turbulence website. It was made possible with
funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.