Join us on our journey of discovery.
Welcome to Evolutionary Translation New Zealand.
This website offers a window into a multi-year research programme that seeks to apply a radically new concept of translation that is biological and genomic, creative and transformative, and responsive to time and place.
A N E T N Z M A N I F E S T O
It all begins with an idea —
Interpretation entails intervention: subjectivity and multiplicity expose the limits of the objective and the univocal as soon as evolution is considered.
Interpretation entails combustion: exact meaning, like an intrusive hornet who has penetrated the beehive of sense, must be overheated into other forms of exactness.
Interpretation entails incision: meaning is taken into and out of reality, violating and being violated by what hosts it as accepted, assumed, agreed representation.
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Interpretation entails inhabitation: the far-away is the new close-by, background and foreground take turn into presenting the past and the future of believable places.
Interpretation entails illumination: light must negotiate with darkness the possibility of colouring the truth, of crediting moonshine as true talk, of land and sea rhyming.
Interpretation entails inscription: the hand that rocks the cradle and rules the world, inking itself new from the margins of what happened in the font-free alphabet of evolution.
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Interpretation entails contrition: blaming yourself for loosening the grip of mea culpa maintains the remorse needed to consider the inconsiderable, to free freedom, to inspire inspiration.
Interpretation entails identification: what is loose and incomplete comes together by gravity, the unfathomable is unfolded, the unconceivable is named, the translation is the original.
Interpretation entails visibility: meaning cannot remain hidden, and truth cannot remain intangible; evolution unveils alternatives and makes you recognize the unspoken and the undone.
What is evolutionary translation?
Evolutionary translation is a bold new perspective that will recalibrate translation studies by disentangling the processes of textual survival and archival loss mediated through multimodal interpretation.
Our projects innovatively combine and extend four concepts:
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Elements of culture shared and passed on through contact and exchange, evolving the systems that host them.
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The elements an original and a translation actually share.
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How the cultural genetics of a text are identified and transmitted.
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A highly subjective, generative approach to interpreting content and data
William du Toit
Cities and the Sky
“This belief is handed down in Beersheba: that, suspended in the heavens, there exists another Beersheba, where the city's most elevated virtues and sentiments are poised, and...the two cities will become one.”
E X P L O R E
Projects
Joyce’s Giacomo Joyce
2024
Calvino’s Invisible Cities
2024
Bookplate Competition
2020—
J O Y C E ' S G I A C O M O J O Y C E
PROJECT SPOTLIGHT
Tyler Shane Tesolin
About Giacomo Joyce
A posthumously published work by James Joyce, Giacomo Joyce is comprised of several written fragments that document the author’s infatuation with one of his students in Trieste, Italy.
We have commissioned translations from artists, writers, and filmmakers who have developed their own responses to Giacomo Joyce. This project threads together each contributor’s response into a digital platform that interacts with Joyce’s private musings and the evolutionary translation of his work today.
Julian Peters
Multimodal Translations
As we delve into the depths of translation, discover the intertwining of languages and the evolution of storytelling.

About us
This website offers a window into a multi-year research programme that seeks to theorise and apply a radically new concept of translation that is biological and genomic, creative and transformative, and responsive to time and place.