Interpreter rota
People who carry the meaning, including visitors who stayed long enough.
Silent labels
Objects without text that only make sense through a conversation.
Visitor words
Each visitor leaves one sentence in their own language for the next.
After every label in the world becomes instantly translatable, one museum chooses people over software to carry meaning.
The provocation
Research at the Da Nang Museum showed how much visitors lose when labels are only in one language. Now imagine the opposite future: every object can be translated by your glasses instantly, and the meaning flattens along the way.
How it would work
This museum bans machine translation. Instead, a rota of human interpreters, students, elders and visitors, walk the rooms. Some objects have no label at all and wait for a conversation.
The question
Is a perfect translation the same as understanding? What do we lose when no one has to explain anything to anyone?