The Translation Chain Project by Logan Kennedy

The Translation Chain Project by Logan Kennedy is a literary experiment that began with a spontaneous question: what happens if a piece of prose is translated repeatedly, with the previous translation used as the source? But what began as a playful idea led Kennedy to consider one the most pressing matters of our time: the rise of artificial intelligence.

This book offers thoughtful observations and insights for translators, writers whose work has been translated, readers of translated work—anyone who cares about words, language, and the sharing of culture. For as writer Paul Auster says, translators make it possible for cultures to talk to one another.

Kennedy, an experienced translator, describes her approach to this literary experiment as—

“… I am seriously interested in the transmission of ideas, information, stories, music and humour across divides. And I am also interested in retranslation as a practice that exists in the world, in cases where a source text is not available or accessible and so an interpretation of an interpretation takes place.”

Kennedy starts with the game of telephone as a metaphor but soon realizes the project is less about distortion and more about how skilled translators work to keep a text alive. She settles on the more potent metaphor of translation as a relay race, where each translator passes the baton skilfully to the next.

The book is organized into three parts. Part I introduces the translation brief and the source text that will be translated, as well as transcripts of the resulting translations. The source text by Kennedy—a poetic and philosophical reflection on languages, her work as a translator, and her perspective as a mother with a child about to leave home—provides a poignant and personal point-of-view that threads throughout the text, all the way to the beautifully written epilogue.

The chain begins with the language of Mi’kma’ki, where Kennedy now lives. From there the text is translated to English, German, French, Italian, Scottish Gaelic, and finally back to English. Kennedy then shares an in-depth analysis of the how the source text was affected by each translation in the chain, focusing on gains, losses and preservation.

This analysis and reflection naturally lead to the second part of the book, an exploration of the question: how would machine translation do by comparison? Undertaking this additional experiment, Kennedy admits she is not an impartial witness to the rising use of AI as her own livelihood is threated by developments in artificial intelligence and machine translation.

Interestingly, Kennedy chooses the term “conscious” translation rather than “human” translation, reasoning that machine translation draws on vast collection of translations and texts written by people and thus is human in nature, just not consciously written. For the machine translation, Kennedy uses the software program DeepL (one tool of many she currently uses in her translation work, but judiciously and for specific purposes, and always with human oversight). Kennedy then undertakes a detailed analysis of the resulting texts and reflects on the role of conscious human thought in relation to viable translation.

As the project progressed Kennedy and her partner Leo were beginning to be asked to look over and improve material that been re-translated by machine translation software. This prompts the pair to conduct a third and final experiment, one that compares a “purely” human translation of the same source text, with a human-edited version of the machine translation. Poet Alice Burdick takes on the task of doing two experimental edits of these newly translated texts. The results of this final experiment are discussed via a free-wheeling conversation between Kennedy and her partner.

In the book’s conclusion, Kennedy outlines her concerns about the increasing use of unmediated AI for translation but also insists, “I’m not ready to book that direct flight to Dystopia quite yet.”

Kennedy’s strength as a writer is her willingness to follow her curiosity, wherever it might lead. While her observations are cerebral, her tone is conversational, and her approach is both playful and serious. Her reflections and analysis are always thoughtful and in-depth.

As Giller Prize winner Johanna Skibsrud observes on the back cover blurb, this project is an—

“… exuberant celebration of the always risky, always necessary, acts of translation involved in everything that means anything [and] asks that we pay attention to difference, difficulty, error, and the active on-going process of interpretation …”

And like any good experiment—or literary conversation—this book generates new questions. Questions about our responsibility as writers, as readers, as sense-makers, and as users of technology. Questions about trust, and the importance of collaboration and discernment in our ongoing quest to understand ourselves, each other, and the world.

Logan Kennedy is a translator and writer from Nova Scotia. With her husband Leonhard Unglaub, she has translated plays, poetry, essays on art and architecture, exhibition texts for major museums in Germany and around the world, academic articles and books, and film titles. Her creative writing includes poetry and plays. She has published two chapbooks—Overworld Exigencies and Groping in the Daylight (as Augusta Wynde)—with the Little Books Collective, Lunenburg, NS.

Publisher: Guernica Editions (April 1, 2026)
Paperback: 9” x 6” | 200 pages
ISBN: 1778490239

Catherine Walker

Catherine Walkeris a writer/editor living on the South Shore of Miꞌkmaꞌki (Nova Scotia). A founding member of the Little Books Collective, a community-building micropress in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, Catherine is the author of two chapbooks: Short Takes: My seven-week career in the film biz (2024) and the call of many sorrows: fourteen poems (2023).

Catherine Walker

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