In my role as International Coordinator of the School of Education, Trinity College Dublin, I run monthly workshops with international students. Since the outbreak of COVID-19, I have noted that international students’ (both in my cohort, and elsewhere) reported feelings of alienation and social disconnectedness.

Although International Student Mobility did not completely halt during the pandemic, it significantly decreased, with those international students participating in exchange programmes reporting feelings of social isolation and disorientation due to the ongoing lockdown restrictions.

As an interdisciplinary project, lacunae draws on performing arts, embodied cognition and translation studies to foster international students’ intercultural awareness through an exploration of Untranslatable Worlds.

From Malinowski’s analysis on the translation of Untranslatable Words onwards, many have documented culturally specific terms that do not have a direct translation. Take the Gaelic word aduantas, meaning ‘unease or anxiety caused by being somewhere new, or by being surrounded by people you don’t know’ (illustrated above by artist Yang Yang).

Or the Urdu term goya,  meaning ‘a transporting suspension of disbelief, an ‘as if’ that feels like reality’; the Yaghan word Mamihlapinatapai, loosely translated as ‘the silent acknowledgement between two people who agree but are both unwilling to initiate’ (Sanders, 2015). These words, and hundreds of others, cannot be translated directly; only sometimes can they be grasped at a conceptual level.

Untranslatable words are potent vessels to engender the distinctiveness of individual cultures, while grasping the similitude of humanity. However, the potential of untranslatable words remains untapped in intercultural education.

The Lacunae project posits the body as a vehicle for deciphering the untranslatable.

Embodied cognition is a phenomenological paradigm that constructs knowledge as lived experience, rejecting the dualist mind/body view. In education, this implies paying attention to the cognitive and affective sphere of student experience.

The embodied paradigm originated in philosophy (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, 1968) and, since its conception, has been explored in education (Nguyen & Larson, 2015) neuroscience (Damasio, 2010; Immordino-Yang, 2016) performance (Bryon, 2017) and language education (Duffy, 2015).

The issue of ‘untranslatability’ has been a much-discussed topic in translation studies, with recent debate linking it to performability (Glynn & Hadley, 2021). However, although the (un)translatability topic has received a lot of attention, the debate has been largely theoretical, and trapped to a textual conception of translation. In the present study, on the other hand, we propose an applied approach to untranslatability, working with/through the body in space.

Lacunae is a multimodal project aiming at the creation of an arts-based intervention to explore the potential of Untranslatable Words. The target of the arts-based intervention is international students on exchange programmes in Higher Education settings in Ireland.

In my previous research, I explored the crucial role of dramatic tension to maximise intercultural engagement (Piazzoli, 2017; 2018). This project examines various types of dramatic tension and their relationship with ‘the untranslatable’. The work-in-progress research question is: How can Untranslatable Words be explored performatively to channel dramatic tension towards intercultural awareness? will become the point of departure for the performative inquiry.

To address this question, an international team of artists and researchers will explore how performance can unveil the wealth of insights stored within Untranslatable Words. The inquiry draws on Practice-as Research methodology (Nelson, 2013) and arts-based research practice (Leavy, 2020).

The title of this project, Lacunae: Embodying the Untranslatable refers to the lexical, the aesthetic, social and research connotations of the noun ‘lacunae’.

In translation studies, the term lacunae is used to refer to the lexical gap between two words that cannot be translated literally.

On a social level, lacunae imply the social void left by the lack of social interaction and loss of sociality brought about by COVID-19.

On an aesthetic level, lacunae symbolise the empty space around the body. In performative arts, empty space is seen as rich potential for meaning making; in dance, for example, negative space is the empty area around the dancer.

Finally, lacunae can be construed as a metaphor for knowledge construction; this connects to its original meaning in Italian, whereby a lacuna translates a ‘knowledge gap’ [from Latin lacus].

Bryon, E. (2017). Transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary exchanges between embodied cognition and performance practice: working across disciplines in a climate of divisive knowledge cultures. Connection Science, 29(1), 2-20.

Damasio, A. R. (2010). Self comes to mind: Constructing the conscious brain. New York: Pantheon.

Duffy, P. B. (2015). Brain, mind and drama: Embodied cognition, encoding and drama education. International Year Book for Research in Arts Education, Münster: Waxmann, 241-45.

Immordino-Yang, M. H. (2016). Emotions, learning, and the brain: Exploringthe educational implications of affective neuroscience. New York: Norton.

Glynn, D., & Hadley, J. (2021). Theorising (un) performability and (un) translatability. Perspectives, 29(1), 20-32.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of perception. Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The visible and the invisible. Northwestern University Press.

Nelson, R. (2013). Practice as research in the arts: Principles, protocols, pedagogies, resistances. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Nguyen, D. J., & Larson, J. B. (2015). Don’t forget about the body: Exploring the curricular possibilities of embodied pedagogy. Innovative Higher Education, 40(4), 331-344.

Sanders, E. F. (2015). Lost in Translation: An Illustrated Compendium of Untranslatable Words. Square Peg.

Schewe, M. (2020). Performative in a nutshell. Scenario: A Journal for Performative Teaching, Learning, Research, (1), 103-110.