Tessellation Symmetry:
Translation (Slide)

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This is the basic "tile" shape of the first tessellation on this page. it's a horse and a hawk together. The tessellation is made by repeating the tile over and over again, and fitting all the copies of the tile together.

The tiles in this picture are copies of one another that are simply shifted from one place to another, without tilting or flipping them over or resizing them.

This kind of tessellation symmetry-- tile repeating-- is called Translation and/or Sliding. Both of those names mean the same thing.

So, why do we call it "translation"? Well, we call that movement a "translation" because we "translate" the tile along the X-axis and the Y-axis. In math class, we'd say that we can move a line along a graph by saying "X=Y" for the original line and "X¹ + 4 = Y¹" for the line that would be 4 boxes above it on a piece of graph paper. The original line XY is "translated" along the Y axis to make line X¹Y¹.

Now take a look at the other pictures on this page. The cats and the ducks are also "tiles" that translate/slide/glide left or right, up or down, to fill in the picture. They don't tilt or resize or flip over. On the next page, we'll see tiles that DO flip over.