by Ella Alencar
The American artist Maira Kalman once said: “A visit to a museum is a search for beauty, truth, and meaning in our lives. Go to museums as often as you can.” There is no denying the importance of museums to society and one of the first things people look for when roaming the galleries of a museum is the labels. These labels not only give information that experts need, but also allow the everyday tourist or museum go-er to understand the items on display.
“Contemporary museums have long since moved on from the state where objects were left to “speak for themselves”: where they were labelled in only a minimal way, and hence left uninterpreted and uncontextualised.” (Ravell, 1996) If you were to step into the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Egyptian Collection, you would see a beautiful stone sculpture of a half-human half-lion creature. Without any further help, you might think that was all there was to it–but as the MET’s label says, it depicts the female Pharaoh of Egypt named Hatshepsut. The strong lion, beard, and “handsome face” were meant to portray her as the idealized Egyptian pharaoh.
The label is in English, as are most labels in museums all over the United States. However, around 2 million New Yorkers do not speak English fluently, and New York is one of the places that welcomes the most tourists from all over the world per year. Something similar can be said of other major U.S. cities with museums. The need for these people to access and connect with the objects in a museum should be of great concern.
There are many challenges that can be faced when attempting to translate the labels in a museum. One of the main challenges is that a museum cannot have a tangible label of every language in the world on display. There is also the challenge of deciding which languages to prioritize when translating exhibitions.
As technology advances, we have to find ways to further improve language accessibility in museums. Though labels in several languages have been proposed to bring this accessibility, this can result in cluttering and a limited number of languages. Having translations in individual devices is truly the best solution to museum language accessibility; as exemplified by many museums around the globe. One example of this is the Museé Rodin in Paris where they provide digital devices for audio descriptions in six different languages. The MET also has audio tours in several different languages with no additional cost for visitors.
In her article “Translating the Museum Experience for Inclusion & Accessibility,” Jill Bishop presents: “By collaborating with multilingual group facilitators or interpreters, museums can gather valuable feedback on user experiences, identify language-related challenges, and understand how to better cater to their needs.” By having language experts and translators work together with museum experts, these translation problems can be slowly, but efficiently, remedied, and the digital translations currently in use can be improved even more.
By having more translators involved in museum work, we can increase language accessibility from one, two, or six languages, to the three to four hundred languages spoken across the country. Also, with dedicated expert translators, those translations can be even more true to the original and can make deeper connections with the multilingual communities that visit our museums.
About Ella:
Ella is currently an English Writing and Art History major at Wheaton College, in Chicago, IL. She is editor in chief of the Wheaton College Writing Center Blog and a contributing writer of The Wheaton Record. Ella is passionate about language, writing, art, and journalism. She is the summer 2025 editor of The Gotham Translator.
Follow Ella Alencar on: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ella-alencar-5b1509362
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