Equivalence languages

Project by Ema

During the prototyping sessions of SI29, in which the theme was File Sharing, i started to think about file contents and their interpretations.

Going more towards the philosiphical and less technical side of file sharing, my focus of research and experimentations was set onto codign languages.

When speaking about Files, you are facing a huge pletora of formats (.extensions). Whens coming to share an image with someone, most of the time the extension of such is not important for the receiver. Our devices can already interpret and convert most of the image file formats, so when sending-sharing an image to someone else, what is important is what gets displayed, not its file extension.

On that, the content of a file cannot always be easily understood, like something that is visual. There are many file types that doesn't deal with pixels but with written texts.

Coding languages for example rely on a very specific vocabulary and thus extensions (.html, .css, .py...). The content of such files is basically text.

So I was interested in the idea of the interpretation and translation of those. I wanted to explore the friction between language, vocabulary, translation, text and instructions, to use them less as what they're just intended to be: a set of instructions that have a functioning output.

So... when i send an image of something to whoever, they will interpret this image based on their cultural background and set of knowledge. When I send a text, they do have to know the language and the vocaboulary of that text in order to understand it, otherwise you're stuck... lost.

Coding languages are languages. Are they really? to what extent? Are they languages or a set of instructions?

-- for the sake of the topic presented here and in which i'm delving into, i would redirect you to their definitions: Language - Instructions

The protoype

I selected CSS as the coding language to test this idea. Why? Cause CSS is very based on words rather then numbers. CSS also works in english and in english only.

For the first test i used the CSS code of the Special Issue 28 landing web page, that i took from Git. Because: it was a CSS code that was already done and contained many functions-->vocaboulary-->different words. Being a CSS newby myself, it was easier for me to start with something already done then to start from scratch writing something myself.

I took the code

saved it in .txt --> why? cause i didn't want to influence the receiver from the file extension. I wnated the receiver to interpret it mainly as text.

asked them to translate everything that they could in their native language

once finished, i sent it to someone else speaking their same language, and asked to translate it back to english

What happened?

left: originalcenter: italianright: back to english from italian