Translating Dig-Sites to the Stars

Department of Writing, University of California: Santa Barbara

Writing 2: Academic Writing

Prof. Valentina Fahler

August 30, 2020

 The year is 3017, the world is unified under the United Human Coalition, and peace

dominated the planet. Cultural independency was deemed to undermine the goals of the

Coalition, and thus was expunged from human society. The ecumenopolization of earth is

underway; massive cities across earth are being made to accompany the ever increasing

population of the planet. One day, in the steppes of Euashia, progress stopped as construction

crews found something that needed more, discreet attention.

Foreman Frank Eudis sat in his office, overlooking ledgers and efficiency quotas when

he heard the greatest fear of a foremen. “Frank! You need to come see this!” echoed across the

construction site, above the noise of the machines and men. Rushing out of his office Eudis

quickly found his chief excavator pilot, Hughes. “Follow me” rushed Hughes, and beckoned

Eudis towards the dig site. After a short walk and descent Hughes pointed towards the bottom of

the quarry, and blankly staring back at them both was an intact human skull, squatting amongst

the ash and dirt.

Arch-archeologist Larry Kilgore quickly heard of the news of the construction site turned

archeological dig. After hearing about the human skull, he also had suspicions on the type of site

that was found, especially have deep the skull been found. Intrigued about the site, went to see

who was assigned to the project. Quickly sliding through his tablet, he realized that this was

about to become significantly more complicated, Both James Guerra and Terry Walker were

assigned as heads of the project. “I wonder if those two are already trying to kill each other…”

Kilgore murmured to himself. Immediately flying over to Euashia, the Arch-Archeologist

wondered how he was going to do with these two extremists.

“This is ABSOLUTLY useless! We already know what has happened here, those

barbarians before us buried their dead instead of cremation!” “Have you forgot that our job is to
find out as much as we possibly can about everything before us? That includes their culture,

regardless of what they have done and our current circumstances!” Guerra and Walker have

already started their endless circle of arguments when Kilgore entered the dig site. Kilgore

walked up to the embattled persons and said calmly “have you both even completed the dig in its

entirety?” Kilgore slyly glances at the previous quarry. “It doesn’t look like it; finish your dig

first before you lose your jobs.” Kilgore went back to his lab, waiting for the samples of the dig

site to enter his lab for testing, and as he expected, textiles and other fabrics came back. They

found a graveyard.

Kilgore tested the fabrics that were isolated in the usual way, using the molecule isolator

to determine which dyes were used in the clothes of the buried deceased. After doing some

carbon dating, the graveyard was determined to be from the 2000s, and he had obtained some

interesting results. Much knowledge of the 2000s were lost form the 2020 disasters, causing most

data from around the time period to be destroyed. He found that the dyes used in the textiles can

from more places than he imagined them to, even outside the borders of Euashia.

Kilgore was puzzled, how did these people so long ago with their primitive technology

and worldview be capable of such economic and social feats? Immediately scrambling out of the

lab he needed to find more sites that shared this same discovery.
 I translated an academic journal article detailing the textiles and dyes found in a 1st

century Mongolian tomb complex into a sciencesci-fi fictional piece for teens. The biggest

difference between the two genres that I translated between is the targeted audience of the

genres. An important part of the writing studies definition of genre is how the expectations of the

audience of a genre determines its characteristic. Bickmore quotes Charles Bazerman’s analysis

of genre, saying “the structural characteristics of genres emerge from repeated instances of action

and are reinforced by institutional power structures” (Bickmore, 2016). Genres emerge from the

expectations of the audience, and the audience of academic journal articles and readers of

science fiction are quite different. These disparities cause the differences in the genres that I

experienced when I did the translation. Translating and reflecting on the translation of an

academic journal into fiction helped me understand the differences between the genres.

I chose to translate the scholarly journal article to fiction because I thought that it would

be an interesting project, and that it would be simple to analyze because of the large differences

between the genres. Science fiction as a literary genre appeals to a wide group of teens (at least

archetypically). It may have to do with the sense of escapism that is inherent to the idea of the

future, where anything is possible, and any current problems do not exist or are resolved. Fiction

can also be an outlet to describe the current state of human society in the form of extremes to act

as social critiques, appealing to the “rebellious” teen. Some examples of these types of fiction

include Brave New World and 1984.

In order to do the translation, I mainly focused on my previous readings of science fiction

and what I thought the potential story surrounding a dig site in the far future could be. Using

other science fiction works as a basis for my own translation was a good idea to create a baseline

for any tropes and plotlines that I would want to create. While I really did not focus on creating a
multimodal text, it still applies under multimodality from Melanie Gagich quotation of Cheryl E.

Ball and Colin Charlton saying “every piece of communication a human composes—use more

than one mode. Thus, all writing is multimodal” (Gagich, 72). The modes that I utilized for my

paper include the visual, spatial, and literary mode. One example of the use of the visual mode

was the capitalization of the words in the argument between the two archeologists. Meanwhile

the spacing and formattinga formatting created by the paragraphs constitutes the structural mode

of the piece. Lastly the words used and plot fall under the literary mode.

The main challenge of the translation was making something worthwhile to read from the

standpoint of the audience. The majority of the challenge comes from the fact that this is my first

attempt of creative writing, thus I am not exactly sure what I am doing. One possible fix is that I

could perform is to focus on character development and dialogue to add interest as I cannot fully

develop a world within the page limit. Yet good dialogue for a complete beginner may be an

even harder feat than the world. I certainly learned that writing good fiction is hard, and once

you get beyond the jargon and massive amounts of information, writinginformation writing

scholarly journals isare not that hard. The difficulty in constructing scholarly articles is the

required testing and obtaining data. I feel reasonably comfortable saying this as I wrote an

extremely simple review of a group of chemical processes last in spring 2020. Learning how to

appropriately read other journal articles was the main challenge of the paper, which mirrors the

research and experimentation required for journal articles.

The audience of the journal article requiresrequire the article to be short, succinct, and to

the point while fiction readers want more complex and interesting stanzas. The collegiate

academic audience that relies upon the journal article for their own research and livelihoods do

not require any form of superfluous information about topicstopic not central to the main
pointstopic of the paper. There was no mention of any competition or conflict of interests

between researchers publishing the article, and no detail on how the digs site was found within

the translated journal article. Great detail was given to the exact pieces found and their relevant

descriptions compared to other scraps of textiles. Some examples include material, patterns, and

color observed of uncovered fabrics when the tomb was uncovered. The prose utilized in the text

is spartan, direct, and unembellished when describing the chemical procedure that was used to

isolate the dyes within the textiles. When describing the fabrics found in the tombs, a passage

from the journal article reads “Dye identification and fiber analysis were conducted for

archaeological textiles from the 22nd Noin-Ula barrow. After analysis and restoration all fabrics

were returned to Mongolia. A total of 30 samples of the textile fragments were analyzed (Table

1). All samples had different degrees of preservation. Samples colors were of various shades of

brown (Karapova et al.).This style of writing These is not the is are at ends with the expectations

of the audience reading science fiction and fiction in general. Some of the greatest writers in this

genre use prose that can be very confusing in the first reads of the text, yet enjoyment and

fulfillment can be obtained when the text and subtext are fully understood. One famous example

is Ernest Hemmingway’s iceberg technique in which he gives the audience as little information

as possible, to add depth and interest to only a few lines. This is the exact opposite effect the

writing in the journal article accomplishes, demonstrating how differing the audiences are.

The end goal of both genres is still to give knowledge held by the author to the audience

reading the pieceWhat constitutes information in each genre is an interesting consideration when

analyzing the differences between the two genres. The difference between the genres is the

information that they are spreading. Information in fiction can be events in the plot of the story,

dialogue, and the thoughts and monologues of characters representing ideas and concepts of the
author being presented to the audience. Information in scholarly journal articles includes data

points, quotations, readings from instruments, and other empirical studies. Both share the basic

concepts of knowledge and ideas passing between the author and audience through the medium

of the genre being written. Information in fiction however is much more of a one-sided

conversation, the author pouring out their story and the themes and morals behind it. Reading a

journal article however is more akin to reading a graph or a textbook and is more of a personal

source of knowledge to be used and leveraged later.

TI think that transferring information from the empirical journal article to fiction was

easier than doing the reverse translation. With the plethora of objective information in the journal

article I was free to add details that were ommitedenumerated in the journal article because of

necessity. I did this while being able to keep the general storyline from the journal article of the

isolation and analysis of the dyes within the textiles and reasonable conclusions about 1st century

intercontinental trade. For the time differential I merely adjusted the dates by 1000 years to

adhere to my setting in the translated genre. In order to make the story interesting I attempted to

add mystery and conflict around the dig site itself, which I had the most opportunity to add

superfluous detail not in the journal article. Meanwhile I deemphasized the bookkeeping of the

materials used and the procedure of actually isolating the dyes in the real-world tomb. I hide this

behind a future process that lacks explanation besides a descriptive name. If I had to make a

journal article from a science fiction source, understanding what was important enough to

include in the journal would be a subjective task.I had no complications with that because if

information was included in a journal article, it is important and relevant to the argument of the

paper.
 Overall, conducting the translation fromform an academic journal article to a piece of

science fiction was a success, at least in my opinion. Doing the translation helped further my

understanding on how genres differ and interact with each other in a literary environment.
 Works Cited

Bickmore, Lisa. (2016). Genre in the Wild: Understanding Genre Within Rhetorical

(eco)Systems. (SLCC English Department, Ed.). Open English @ SLCC

Gagich, Melanie. (2020). An Introduction to and Strategies for Multimodal Composing. Writing

Spaces, (3). Parlor Press, WAC Clearinghouse

Karpova, E., Vasiliev, V., Mamatyuk, V., Polosmak, N., Kundo, L. (2016). Xiongnu burial

complex: A study of ancient textiles from the 22nd Noin-Ula barrow (Mongolia, first

century AD). Journal of Archaeological Science, (70), (15-22)