This video essay explores the role of metaphor in voice pedagogy, offering a reflective inquiry into how figurative language shapes the way voice artists experience, understand, and inhabit their vocalities. Drawing on diverse traditions and contemporary practices, Voice in Translation investigates how metaphors such as “support” or “open the throat” mediate embodied learning.

Rather than dismissing metaphorical language as imprecise, the essay considers it a problematic yet critical tool for translating intangible phenomena into sensory and affective experiences.

Through juxtaposed film stills and voiceover, the work foregrounds how metaphors function cognitively, historically, and culturally—at times clarifying, at others constraining. It aims to raise questions about access, power, and the often-unexamined assumptions embedded in pedagogical language, particularly how metaphors may include or exclude certain bodies, experiences, or ways of knowing. Attentive to intertextuality and embodiment, Voice in Translation invites us to consider voice education not only as technical transmission but as a site of ongoing negotiation between
body, meaning, and vocality.