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A note from the founder, Charly Santagado:

When I entered Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University as a Piano Performance major in 2013, I was shocked to realize that while the musicians occasionally engaged with the dancers and actors they shared a building with to fulfill this or that requirement, they rarely diverged from their insular circles. I soon discovered that this practice wasn’t some quirk of the music department; my minors in creative writing and dance further demonstrated the unsettling unspoken boundaries between artistic disciplines at my university. My dismay at the fragmentation within Rutgers’ arts community eventually sparked my senior honors thesis in philosophy, The Art of Translation (2017) [linked below], which explores both overt and subtle relationships between artistic mediums, and culminates in the construction of a translation methodology.

Movenglish, a project started in late 2018, is a movement language in progress that directly corresponds to English. In this language, the nuances of English (i.e. sound, meaning, connotation, tense, difficulty, part of speech etc.) are embodied in as objective a fashion as possible through both the accumulation of collective human intuitions and in-depth analyses of words and concepts. Movenglish attempts to preserve existing relationships between words and to create a consistent, rule-based grammatical structure that is easily applied to novel situations. Movenglish’s notation system is simply regular English, which alleviates many of the challenges that other notation systems face.

 

 
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Resources

 

Movenglish: Dance as Sign System (2021)
by Nikolai Popow

 

The Art of Translation (2017)
by Charly Santagado

Abstract:

It is widely accepted that the ability to translate across languages is vital to global communication. Translation is also relevant in other affairs including currency exchange, weights and measures, and even abstract activities like transforming thought into language. One place that translation is rarely talked about is within the arts, yet it is nonetheless important. As with any other communicative process, certain art resonates best with certain people, while other art is more striking to others. Due to this uneven distribution, the question naturally arises of whether it is possible to get these different kinds of people to reach the same states as each other. I will argue that the way to bridge these gaps in appreciating works of art is through artistic translation. Through such a process, the deep level of understanding and appreciation that some are able to reach by experiencing certain artistic works can be shared with a larger community. I first attempt to set up a framework about what art is by providing a few different examples and quotations that capture the characterization of art that I endorse in this paper, which consists of four basic elements (experiential nature, specific and intentional structure, openness for interpretation, and display of positive unity) and three supplementary elements (effortful acquisition, ability to survive complexities and contradictions, and contrast between tension and resolution). Next, I discuss the nature of truth and what is meant by artistic truth, contrasting it with a deflationist, verificationist account of truth, and arguing that artistic truth is not bivalent, and instead exists on a spectrum. Finally, with a working definition of art and a grasp of artistic truth, I tackle the object of translation, calling upon Levinson’s article Messages in Art, and go through a few sample translations across various artistic media. Beyond the practical applications briefly mentioned above, I hope that the translatability of art helps to further demonstrate the universality of the field as a whole.


Handspeak is an online ASL Dictionary with a plethora of words translated into American Sign Language through videos and descriptions. It is an invaluable resource in the pursuit of learning ASL and has been used as a resource in the development of Movenglish.