+ About the Work

The book Mechanical Turk, author of the Quixote is based on Jorge Luis Borges' short story Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote. In the story, Borges introduces us to the most significant work of a fictional 20th-century French writer—the translation of a small portion of Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote.

Menard's version recreates Cervantes' Quixote word for word but the narrator argues that Menard's version is infinitely richer, pointing out that the time elapsed between texts has altered the relationship between words and meanings, a relationship that is mediated by the reader.

For this project I asked workers at Amazon Mechanical Turk to re-write Pierre Menard's portion of Don Quixote. Amazon Mechanical Turk is an online crowdsourcing marketplace where people can execute human intelligence tasks (HITs), tasks that can't be done correctly, consistently, or efficiently by computers. On the website you post a small task and announce how much money people will get for executing it.

The intent here was not to determine which translation was more accurate but to explore what is revealed about the translators and their context through their creative “infidelities.”