Listen and Learn

Did you know that a United States president once stood in front of a German audience and declared to them that he was a jelly donut? Or that a pair of famous teenage lovers from 16th century Italy have more recently been found singing and dancing up and down alleyways in New York City?

As part of this challenge, you’ll learn more about both of these incidents in the Communicate and Adaptation quests, respectively. You’ll also learn about the difficulties we can run into when trying to make ourselves understood and the choices that are sometimes made when attempting to adapt information from one format to another, such as when a play is adapted into a movie musical.

In the Communicate quest, you used the Bad Translator tool to see how the meaning of a quote or other brief piece of writing changed after being translated into 10 different languages. The Adaptation quest challenged you to think about the complications of adapting a text from one format to another.

To complete the Listen & Learn challenge, take the translation you received from the Bad Translator and think about what other forms you could adapt it into. For example, the “I am a Berliner” example used in the Communicate quest was translated by the Bad Translator into “I am in Berlin,” which could be adapted into a video of people in cities called Berlin around the world stating, “I am in Berlin.”

Submit a detailed description of your adaptation idea or the adaptation itself to complete the Listen & Learn challenge.