COURSE: Library & Information Science 999: Independent Reading and Research
MEDIUM: Website
DESCRIPTION:
The Swahili Verse Project is a collaborative digital language initiative developed from fieldwork with translators in Kenya. The project addresses a recurring challenge: many contemporary terms in technology, governance, and global discourse lack agreed-upon or contextually grounded meanings in Swahili. Rather than viewing these gaps as deficiencies, it reframes them as opportunities for collective knowledge production. Through workshops and sustained dialogue, linguists, professional translators, and academics debate usage, unpack cultural nuance, and co-create relevant equivalents. The result is a community-informed repository that reflects living language.
ARTIST’S STATEMENT:
This project was created out of my fieldwork in Kenya, where I worked closely with translators navigating the rapidly evolving digital economy. In our conversations, one issue surfaced repeatedly: the absence of contextual data. Many words circulating in technology, governance, and global discourse simply do not have agreed-upon meanings in Swahili. Translators were not just converting language; they were negotiating culture, power, and relevance in real time. I created this project as both a response and an intervention. Rather than treating translation gaps as individual shortcomings, I approached them as collective design challenges. I convened linguists, professional translators, and scholars to collaboratively examine untranslated or ambiguously translated terms. Together, we debated meaning, traced cultural implications, and worked toward contextually grounded equivalents. At its core, this work is about linguistic dignity. It asks: Who decides what a word means? And how can collaborative knowledge production challenge dominant technological frameworks? Through this project, translation becomes not just a technical task, but a cultural and political act of preservation, resistance, and imagination.