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Growing up in Galway with her younger sister, Izzy, who has view of their values and mission – for instance they decided spina bifida, Ailbhe Keane’s ‘favourite thing’ was to decorate on a flat rate of €149 for each cover, regardless of the designer, Izzy’s wheelchair – ‘at Christmas, we’d put lights and tinsel on it because ‘we didn’t want the work of up-and-coming designers and for her birthday we’d add ribbons and stickers and I noticed to be seen as less valuable’ and all their covers are made to that it really changed how people interacted with her. Instead of order in Dublin – ‘that way, there’s no waste and we don’t have tiptoeing around her disability, they’d say ‘oh wow, your chair deadstock sitting in warehouses.’ is so cool’ and that would make her feel much more confident.’ In spring 2021, Ailbhe felt she would benefit from a more formal Ailbhe’s passion for art and design got her into NCAD (the business training so applied to do an MBA in Trinity – ‘I liked the National College for Art and Design) in Dublin where idea that I could do it part-time and that I’d be applying she focussed on graphic design – ‘it allows me to everything I was learning directly to the business combine my interests in illustration, animation, and focussing all my assignments on Izzy photography and fashion’. For her final year Wheels.’ She was accepted on a scholarship project, she chose to design a wheelchair and started in September. ‘It’s an intense cover. The response was extraordinary: ‘After our final year show, I was approached to go on Nationwide with Izzy and that was our first viral moment. I was making wheelchair covers for Izzy’s friends and The whole field is just screaming out for innovation because these devices have looked the same for over a 100 years workload on top of an already intense workload – you have to be smart about time management.’ There are fifty in the class, ‘coming from all kinds of backgrounds – some work in putting them on Instagram and we started multinationals and some have their own small getting requests from all round the country. And companies, like me. I’m learning a huge amount then some really great artists asked could they design from all of them, and from the professors obviously. covers for us. That blew me away and the business just took off. There’s a big focus in the course on leadership, business I built our website, and it was amazing when we started getting strategy, organizational behaviour, financial reporting – a lot orders from the US, France, Germany.’ of different aspects that you can apply to a small business.’ In hindsight, their success seems ordained: the wheelchair market is sizeable and covers did exist ‘but only for kids, and they were created by hospitals as permanent fixtures on the chair, so once you put them on, you were stuck looking at them forever – that’s like wearing the same jacket for five years! We were the first to create movable covers that can be changed as the mood takes you.’ Orla Kiely, Peter Donnelly and Malika Favre are just some of the many artists who have designed for Izzy Wheels, whose collections now include Disney, Marvel, Barbie and Hello Kitty designs. The number of artists and studios who want to work with them is huge. Ailbhe understands the appeal: ‘For an artist, a wheelchair cover is a really fun thing to design because it’s circular and spins around and has to look just as good upside and sideways so that’s a really interesting creative challenge, and it’s one of the most functional and essential things you will ever design because it’s something people use every day, and if you get it right, it really brightens their life.’ Ailbhe handles ‘design and business strategy’ and Izzy, who has just graduated BA from NUI Galway, ‘works with our community of wheelchair users and is the face of the brand’ and advises on the practicalities of design – ‘she looks at it from a user perspective, like which materials work best, will they scratch, are they waterproof, are they too heavy?’ The way they have grown the business in just five years is impressive – they got mentoring from Enterprise Ireland and space in the National Digital Research Centre, but it’s been ‘very much learning on the job’. It helps that they have such a clear The year ended brilliantly with Ailbhe and Izzy winning a prestigious EU Prize for Women Innovators in the Rising Innovator category for entrepreneurs under the age of 30, which comes with a €50,000 prize. It was, says Ailbhe ‘really emotional to be at the awards in Brussels, in person, with my sister’. For the future, they want to keep Izzy Wheels small, but will be growing the team cautiously. After their focus over the past few years on designs for kids via their partnerships with Disney and Marvel, they would like now to add to their adult collections – ‘I’d love to work with Gucci, Hermes or Kenzo, one of those luxury brands that have an amazing eye for printing.’ They’re also looking at branching into mobility accessories and devices, like walking frames – ‘the whole field is just screaming out for innovation because these devices have looked the same for over a hundred years’. Disability clothing is another area ripe for design - ‘It’s a really exciting space at the moment, and people are beginning to stop and take note.’ As with their wheelchair covers, they will be selective about who they choose to partner with: ‘We need to make sure that there’s no sense of tokenism - if brands are including people with disabilities in their campaigns or on their runway shows, they need to listen and understand what the needs are. For instance, someone like Izzy, who is in a chair, shouldn’t be wearing clothes that are designed for people standing up. We have thousands of applications from designers and brands who want to work with us, but it has to be someone we really admire, and who isn’t just looking for quick PR. It has to make sense to both of us.’
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Lost in Translation When is the last time you read a translation? It was probably more recently than you think Translation has historically been an easily overlooked activity – something taken for granted – and no more so than in the case of literary and other aesthetic works. Our lazy brains tend to leap to the conclusion that reading a translation is tantamount to reading its source. But if we stop to think, it soon becomes clear that it couldn’t be. Imagine having to explain how a brand new mobile app works to an elderly relation. Many of the words that you might assume a more frequent user of apps would understand implicitly may be meaningless or misinterpreted. Many of the assumptions underpinning the technology and how or why you might use it may also be mysterious to your elderly relative. So you may find yourself using the metaphors of things they are sure to be familiar with, limiting yourself to words you know they understand, and adding to your explanation to make sure they are following what you are saying. In essence, this is the skill of the translator, to identify disparities between the readers of the text in its original context and the readers in its target context, and find solutions to bridge those knowledge gaps, often in as seamless a way as possible. The gaps are not only linguistic. Language is intricately tied together with all the other things that we rather simplistically call “culture”. So, reading a translation is never the same as reading the source text, precisely because of these gaps in language and culture, and literature is possibly the most challenging kind of text in this regard, because it is primarily aesthetic. The Trinity Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation is the college’s hive of activity for people who find these challenges, their myriad possible solutions and their far- reaching implications, fascinating. Since it moved into its newly refurbished headquarters on Fenian Street in 2016, it has quickly become a focal point for students, alumni, professional translators, editors and many others world- wide. As well as its busy schedule of public events, which bring together practising translators, researchers, students and members of the public, the centre houses the college’s award-winning MPhil in Literary Translation and an ever- growing number of doctoral candidates, passionate about seeing language as a bridge, rather than an obstacle, and translation’s capacity to bring people together.
