The language divide is often viewed as a chasm that separates people, but in the exhibition "Found in Translation" it's an opportunity for connection.

"Found in Translation" is a mind-expanding view into both the process and implications of translation: each exhbit turns an idea on its head by viewing it from two or more sides (languages, cultures, genders, points of view)—in the process revealing more similarities than differences. Using text from many languages (including English, Japanese, French, Thai, Vietnamese, Spanish, Khirghiz, Russian, German) and in a variety of media (books, audio CDs, video, photographs and computer software), the exhibit also provides a hands-on interaction with the artwork.

The exhibition is open from May 12-July 21, and is curated by Marshall Weber, produced by Booklyn and produced and hosted by the San Francisco Center for the Book.

Highlights include

•	Xu Bing's Square Word Calligraphy Artist Xu Bing has "translated" words in our Latin alphabet to give them the appearance of Chinese ideograms, with each "character" representing a legible word. Visitors can type into a computer program that translates their words into Square Word, and then print the results. One of the most famous contemporary Chinese artists, Xu Bing has lived in New York since 1992. He has been awarded a MacArthur fellowship as well as several major international awards.
•	Lost Tibetian texts For more than 2000 years, Tibetan monks have been recording their philosophical, cultural and religious heritage into narrow, leger-style books. The Asian Classics Input Project is dedicated to locating, cataloguing, digitally preserving and disseminating these and other rapidly disappearing written treasures of Asia. The exhibit includes not only rescued books but also a video on the preservation and translation process.
•	Jack and Betty Forever In the 1950s and '60s, a whole generation of Japanese studied English by using the textbook "Jack and Betty." For most, it was their first exposure to a foreign language. Jack and Betty's influence is still evident today in Japan—almost everyone who used it remembers it well and can even repeat the first sentence: "This is a pen." In this humorous and insightful takeoff, "Jack and Betty Forever" imagines the protagonists 30 years after they graduated from school.
•	Talking Books To preserve the knowledge of the communities they study, botanists and anthropologists often give back training tools or documentation of their results to the communities they work with. However, for communities that are largely nonliterate, doing so can often be quite a challenge. Nathaniel Bletter, an ethnobiologist studying in Peru and Mali, constructed "talking books"—water-resistant, solar-rechargeable picture books that play, in the users' native language and in English, short audio clips of the names and uses of the plants in the pictures.
•	Rumi, the 13th century poet and mystic In his poetry, Rumi combines philosophy, mysticism, and psychology in a language so piercing as to enter the realm of music. It is this element more than any other which has made his poetry so irresistible to readers for over 700 years, even through the filter of translation. In this book of Zahra Partovi's translations, featuring her own beautiful design binding, New York fine press publisher Vincent Fitzgerald provides a setting to match Rumi's penetrating insights.