The earliest reasonably successful computer translators of language were trained on the Canadian parliamentary Hansard. Because Canada is an officially bilingual country, the Hansard is in both French and English and so computer programmers used the texts as a sort of Rosetta Stone to train their machine translators. This project uses the Google translate camera function to translate the French and English Hansard proceedings for the day that O Canada/Ô Canada was officially adopted as the Canadian national anthem. Still thinking through the theory of this, as concrete poetry, as photographs, as computer layering, language layering, as it relates to national identity, the languages not spoken or translated as well.
Aaron Tucker is the author of two books of poetry, irresponsible mediums (BookThug, 2017) and punchlines (Mansfield Press, 2015), as well as the forthing coming novel Y (Coach House Books, 2018). He has also written two scholarly texts: The Militarized Internet in Hollywood War Films (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and Interfacing with the Internet in Popular Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). In addition, his current collaborative project, Loss Sets, translates poems into sculptures which are then 3D printed (http://aarontucker.ca/3-d-poems/); he is also the co-creator of The ChessBard, an app that transforms chess games into poems (http://chesspoetry.com). Currently, he is a lecturer in the English department at Ryerson Universitywhere he is currently teaching creative and academic writing.