Translating The Multilingual City) Translating The Multilingual City

New Tr e n d s in Tr an s l at i on Stud i e s New Trends in Tra ns lat io n St udies
Vol. 8
Translation is a textual and discursive practice embedded in competing

cultural identities and language ideologies; it is a site through which we
can observe the operations and implications of language power. In this
Tong-King Lee • Translating the Multilingual City

regard, multilingual societies provide fertile ground for the exploration
of translation practice from the perspective of sociolinguistic tension.
Translating the
This book examines the relationship between translation-mediated
multi-literate practice and language ideology in multilingual Singapore.
It problematises literary translation in light of the power relation be-
Multilingual City
tween the official languages in the city-state, with special emphasis on
English and Chinese. Based on published translations and multilingual
anthologies, it investigates the implications of such power relations
for intercultural communication through translation. The book also
Cross-lingual Practices
discusses how the translational problems that accrue from language
ideology may contribute to a nuanced understanding of cross-lingual
and Language Ideology
practice and to the realisation of intercultural knowledge in multilingual
Singapore.
Tong-King Lee
Tong-King Lee is an assistant professor in translation at the University of

Hong Kong.
ISBN 978-3-0343-0850-2
Peter Lang
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via Helena Santiago
New Tr e n d s in Tr an s l at i on St ud i e s N ew Trends in T ra ns lat io n St udies
Vol. 8
Translation is a textual and discursive practice embedded in competing

cultural identities and language ideologies; it is a site through which we
can observe the operations and implications of language power. In this
Tong-King Lee • Translating the Multilingual City

regard, multilingual societies provide fertile ground for the exploration
of translation practice from the perspective of sociolinguistic tension.
Translating the
This book examines the relationship between translation-mediated
multi-literate practice and language ideology in multilingual Singapore.
It problematises literary translation in light of the power relation be-
Multilingual City
tween the official languages in the city-state, with special emphasis on
English and Chinese. Based on published translations and multilingual
anthologies, it investigates the implications of such power relations
for intercultural communication through translation. The book also
discusses how the translational problems that accrue from language
ideology may contribute to a nuanced understanding of cross-lingual
practice and to the realisation of intercultural knowledge in multilingual
Singapore.
Tong-King Lee
Tong-King Lee is an assistant professor in translation at the University of

Hong Kong.
Peter Lang
Tong King Lee - 978-3-0353-0459-6

www.peterlang.com
Downloaded from PubFactory at 03/11/2019 01:01:19PM by subtitulando@gmail.com
via Helena Santiago
Translating the Multilingual City
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New Trends in Translation Studies
V ol ume 8
Series Editor:
Dr Jorge Díaz Cintas
Advis or y Bo ard:
Profes s or S u san B assn et t
Dr Lynne Bowker
Profes s or Frede r ic C hau me
Profes s or A lin e Re mael
PETER LANG
Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien
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Translating the
Multilingual City
Tong-King Lee
PETER LANG
Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien
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Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche National-
bibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at
http://dnb.d-nb.de.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013932943
ISSN 1664-249X
ISBN 978-3-0343-0850-2 (print)
ISBN 978-3-0353-0459-6 (eBook)
© Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern 2013

Hochfeldstrasse 32, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland
info@peterlang.com, www.peterlang.com, www.peterlang.net
All rights reserved.

All parts of this publication are protected by copyright.
Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without
the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution.
This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming,
and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems.
Printed in Germany
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Contents
List of Figures and Tables vii
Preface ix
Chapter 1
Language Ideological Relations and the Problem of Translation 1
Chapter 2
The Bilingual Text in Translation: Paradoxes and Asymmetries 29
Chapter 3
Reading the Cultural Other in Translation 69
Chapter 4
Translation and Language Power Relations in Heterolingual
Anthologies of Literature 105
Chapter 5
Conclusion: Rethinking (Un)translatability and Intercultural
Communication 145
Bibliography 153
Index 163
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List of Figures and Tables
Figure 1 Schematic representation of the translation relation

between English and mother tongue languages in mul-
tilingual literary anthologies (1985–2008) 138
Table 1 Pragmatic functions of the English language in Singapore 10

Table 2 Functional polarisation of Mandarin Chinese and
English in Singapore 11
Table 3 Most frequently spoken language at home among the
Chinese population (aged 5 and above) in Singapore
(1980–2010) 14
Table 4 The ‘one-to-one’ translation model 129
Table 5 The ‘many-to-many’ translation model 129
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Preface
This book is the culmination of a sustained course of thinking about

Singapore literature in translation, one that can be traced back to my
undergraduate days. I started out with an interest in creative works by
local Chinese writers – particularly short fiction, focusing on a very sig-
nificant theme in the relatively short history of contemporary Singapore
Chinese literature: the marginalisation of Chinese language and cul-
ture under the hegemony of English. It was opportune that during this
time, the Department of Chinese Studies at the National University of
Singapore published a series of bilingual anthologies, one of which was
entirely devoted to this theme. Shuttling between the parallel texts in the
anthologies, I was intuitively struck by a vague sense of incongruity between
the apparent textual equivalence mediated by translation and the paradox
of reading, in English, about Chinese cultural identity in crisis. I began
by asking myself a seemingly innocuous question: does translation actu-
ally ‘work’? Textually speaking it no doubt does, but at the higher level of
cultural discourse, to what extent can it fulfil the lofty aim of facilitating
cross-cultural communication? Does engaging the cultural Other neces-
sarily need to be premised on the ‘bridging of gaps’ (to use a well worn-out
metaphor) through translation?
It was not until much later in my academic journey that I was able to
systematically address the above questions and further expand them into
a fruitful research area. Incorporating perspectives from discourse studies
and cultural theories of translation, I began to contemplate the transla-
tion problematic and its relationship to language ideology in Singapore.
My excursion into this cross-disciplinary conceptual project has proved
to be an exciting one. For this I am indebted to Professor Leong Ko for
his patient mentoring and to Professor Lee Cher Leng for inspiring me
to engage in language studies. My gratitude is also due to Professor José
Lambert, Professor Lee Cheuk-yin, Professor Leo Chan and Professor
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x Preface
Zhang Meifang for their advice and encouragement. Mr Peter Lee from the
National Library Board also deserves mention for providing me with the
information I needed to complete the research in Chapter 4. I am grateful
to Mr Choo Teck Song for allowing me to reproduce his poem Yuyeji and
its translation in Chapter 3 of the book.
Some of my previous publications have been reworked and dovetailed
into this book. Parts of Chapter 2 appeared in ‘The crisis of representation in
translating bilingual texts: A social semiotic perspective’ (Perspectives, 19:2,
2011) and ‘Asymmetry in translating heterolingualism: A Singapore case
study’ (Perspectives, 17:1, 2009), while Chapter 4 is revised from ‘Translating
multilingual Singapore: An anthological perspective’ (Babel, 56:1, 2010)
and ‘Translation and language power relations in heterolingual antholo-
gies of literature’ (Babel, 58:4, 2012).
This project is supported by the Louis Cha Fund for East–West Studies,
administered by the Faculty of Arts, University of Hong Kong.
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Chapter 1
Language Ideological Relations and the Problem

of Translation
The motif of loss in contemporary Singapore Chinese

literature
In March 2011, the Youth Book Company (Qingnian shuju) of Singapore and
the publishing arm of Hong Kong’s Ming Pao Monthly jointly published a
two-volume anthology of Singapore Chinese fiction written in the post-
1980 era. In his introduction to the collection, the editor Xi Ni Er, a veteran
writer and incumbent President of the Singapore Writers’ Association,
expounds on the prominent themes dealt with by the Chinese-language
authors represented in the anthology. These themes include ‘a persistence
in [their] mother-culture, an anxiety about education and language policy
reform, a sense of loss over transformations in [Singapore’s] landscape and a
consequent fading away of memories, a resonance with and concern about
the vicissitudes of everyday life among the common folk’ (Chen 2011: vii;
my translation).
It is notable that among the themes singled out here, the first two
pertain to language and culture and, given the context of the anthology,
specifically Chinese language and culture. Indeed this is not the first liter-
ary anthology devoted to exploring the theme of Chinese language and
culture in Singapore and, more importantly, to expressing what I would
term ‘the motif of loss’ pertaining to this language and culture. Back in
2001, a Chinese–English bilingual anthology titled Droplets (Diandi) was
published by the Department of Chinese Studies of the National University
of Singapore. As explicitly stated in the preface to Droplets, the anthology
centres on ‘the contemporary crisis in traditional Chinese culture among
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2 Chapter 1
Singaporean Chinese’ (St André 2001: 11). This formulation forms the
binding theme of the collection, which seeks to bring together the creative
works of Chinese Singaporean authors from the 1980s. Taken as a whole,
these works form a literary corpus that focuses on ‘at times [a] sensitive
topic’ (ibid.: 15): the marginal position of Chinese language and culture
in Singapore society. Under the rubric of this theme, the anthologised
works show a common concern with the relationship between (Chinese)
language, (Chinese) ethnicity and (Chinese) cultural identity (ibid.: 17).1
The editor further states that one of the aims of the bilingual collection is
to allow Singaporeans who are not Chinese-literate to access these works
in English translation, so as to enable them ‘to learn how Chinese-speaking
Chinese in Singapore felt (and, in many cases, still feel) about the changing
nature of Singaporean society roughly between independence and 1990’
(ibid.; my emphasis).
This statement deserves our critical attention, as it is telling not only of
the motivation behind the making of the anthology Droplets, but also of a
language ideological tension subsisting in contemporary Singapore society.
What is referred to by ‘the changing nature of Singaporean society’, and
what has this to do with the language spoken by Chinese Singaporeans,
1 The relationship between language, ethnicity and culture is, of course, constructed
rather than absolute. As Culler (1981/2001: 37) has pointed out in relation to semiot-
ics, ‘the idea of personal identity emerges through the discourse of a culture: the “I”
is not something given but comes to exist as that which is addressed by and relates to
others’. The notion of Chinese (ethnic) identity and its relation to Chinese language
and culture is not a given. And for that matter, the relation between a certain lan-
guage and its associated culture is also emergent rather than natural. In the context
of Singapore, an ethnic Chinese individual may or may not identify him- or her-
self with the Chinese language and its associated culture; it is not uncommon for a
Chinese individual in contemporary Singapore to identify (or to pretend to identify)
him- or her-self with the English language and Anglo-American culture. Thus, the
existing or potential configurations of ethnic, linguistic and cultural identities, for
instance, a predominantly Chinese-speaking Chinese Singaporean versus a predomi-
nantly English-speaking Chinese Singaporean (with other possible configurations
in between the two poles) are not absolute in and of themselves, but rather emerge
in relation to each other.
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bearing in mind that ‘Chinese-speaking Chinese’ is foregrounded here as

a linguistic community? And more directly relevant to the purpose of this
study, what is the relationship between the alleged changes in Singapore
society, the language used by the Chinese community and the question of
translation? Within the context of the quoted statement and the thematic
context of the bilingual anthology, one aspect of this ‘changing nature’
is the way sociolinguistic relations have evolved over the decades following
the city-state’s independence. This evolution is characterised by a rise in
the use and inf luence of the English language and a consequent decline in,
first of all, the Chinese dialects and, subsequently, Mandarin (the spoken
form of Standard Chinese). An understanding of such sociolinguistics is
key to appreciating why Chinese culture in Singapore is said to be facing a
‘contemporary crisis’ and why the position of Chinese language and culture
in Singapore is ‘at times [a] sensitive topic’.
The sociolinguistics of contemporary Singapore will be dealt with
in detail shortly. Suf fice it to say that the evolution of language power
relations has created ‘feelings of crisis and a siege mentality among the
Chinese-speaking community’ (St André 2006a: 35) in Singapore. This
sense of crisis in Chinese language and culture manifests itself as what
I have earlier described as the motif of loss in contemporary Singapore
Chinese literature. In the 1980s through the 1990s, the Chinese cultural
crisis became a major theme in Singapore Chinese literature, as noted by
the editors of the two literary anthologies introduced earlier. Literary
works that explore this theme typically construct an antithetical relation-
ship between two categories of Chinese Singaporeans. On the one hand,
we have the predominantly English-speaking Chinese Singaporeans, who
are not proficient in their native tongue and are culturally inclined towards
Anglo-American (commonly subsumed under the generic rubric ‘Western’)
culture; on the other hand, there are the predominantly Chinese-speaking
Chinese Singaporeans, who not only possess a good command of their
native language but also embrace Chinese cultural values with relative ease.
It must be stated at the outset that these are only discursive catego-
ries constructed by authors, both literary and academic, in imagining
and conceptualising Chineseness in multilingual Singapore. By invoking
these categories, I am not suggesting a simplistic dichotomy between two
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4 Chapter 1
sub-communities of Chinese Singaporeans with competing linguistic af fili-

ations. As mentioned earlier, various other configurations are possible: for
instance, a predominantly Chinese-speaking Chinese Singaporean inclined
towards Western culture, or perfectly bilingual Chinese Singaporeans who
can stride both worlds with ease, although the latter are at best a minority
and at worst an idealisation. However, the duality of Chinese-speaking
versus English-speaking (Chinese) Singaporeans is frequently appropri-
ated by local Chinese literary authors for the purposes of reifying their
language and culture (St André 2006a). For the purposes of this research,
I am interested not in the complex of language relations in the real world
per se – though it does constitute the backdrop of my discussion – but in
language relations as constructed and negotiated in local literature. Thus,
by tapping into the Chinese-speaking versus English-speaking duality, I
am not guilty of reductionism; rather, I am describing language relations
as perceived (and reduced) by Chinese-language authors and re-presented
in their works.
Having said that, we need to concede that there is some truth to the
dichotomy between Chinese-speaking and English-speaking Chinese
Singaporeans (a fact to which I can testify as a native Chinese Singaporean),
un-nuanced as it may sound to some critics.2 The extent to which this stands
2 The obvious problem with this dichotomy is that it leaves out a group of Chinese
Singaporeans who are bilingual and bicultural in English and Chinese. Nevertheless,
we must not be too quick in discrediting bipolar distinctions like this either. It does
make little sense to speak of Chinese Singaporeans as either ‘English-speaking’
or ‘Chinese-speaking’ in a strict sense, as if linguistic communities could ever be
wholly monolingual. However, the sense of having come from an ‘English-speaking
background’ or a ‘Chinese-speaking background’ was pervasive in contemporary
Singapore and arguably still exists today. This social-psychological phenomenon has
its roots in the days when English-medium schools and Chinese-medium schools
were distinct institutions, leading to what Tan (2002, 2003) has called a ‘Heartlander-
Cosmopolitan Divide’ (see Chapter 1, ‘The sociolinguistics of Singapore, with special
emphasis on the relation bewteen English and Chinese’). Most of the literary works
studied in this book were written in the late 1980s through the 1990s, which was
roughly within a decade from the time when Chinese-medium schools were eradi-
cated from the education system. This makes the application of the Chinese versus
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up to empirical testing, though, is really beside the point. As mentioned,

what is of interest to us here is that the Chinese–Western antithesis exists
as a significant literary motif perpetuating across a considerable range of
works. It is the discursive reality, in other words, that I am exploring here.
In this reality, Chinese, as both language and culture, is constructed as a
positive entity endeared to by Chinese Singaporeans, one that excludes any
notion of the ‘West’. In examining cultural memory as a trope in Singapore
and Malaysian Chinese literature, St André (2006a: 40) observes that
Singapore Chinese literary works:
have a tendency to reify a timeless ‘Chinese culture’ which Singaporean Chinese

are exhorted to remember and admonished not to forget. This Chinese culture is
premodern in nature, celebrated for its antiquity and achievements, and composed
of fixed and timeless elements which can be listed, and which must be kept pure like
the tea. Finally, the Chinese language is seen as the most basic tool for the preserva-
tion of this culture both in memory and in writing; its disappearance signals the end
of all Chinese culture in Singapore […] For all of these writers, Chinese culture is a
‘package deal’ which you either accept or reject.
Within the literary corpus studied in St André’s research, Chinese is a cul-

tural notion whose importance is diminishing in contemporary Singapore
and therefore must be salvaged from elimination/extinction at all costs. At
work here is the motif of loss, which is inextricably tied to cultural memory
and language identity, both of which are perceived to be in crisis in the
advent of things labelled ‘Western’.
English (or Western) antithesis less problematic as it might seem, as the distinction
would arguably be visibly felt during that time. Today, even though all mainstream
schools in Singapore are English-medium institutions by default, some institutions
do retain the shadow of their linguistic and cultural legacies. For instance, two of
the most famous high schools, Hwa Chong Institution and Raf f les Institution,
come from strong Chinese-school and English-school traditions respectively and
still display such dispositions (not as overt expressions, but as implicit inclinations).
In the psyche of many Singaporeans, the two institutions remain the hallmark of a
Chinese-based education and an English-based education respectively, even though
both are in actual fact English-medium schools, with students from the two schools
learning Chinese and English as dual first languages.
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6 Chapter 1
I shall return to this motif in subsequent chapters with concrete exam-

ples from published literature. For now, I am taking the motif as a point of
departure to bring the question of translation and cultural identity into the
picture. Insofar as this motif of loss in contemporary Singapore Chinese
literature constitutes an interesting literary phenomenon in its own right,
we might take a translational turn and ask: what happens textually when
this literature of crisis (some of which is bilingual, see Chapter 2), whose
aim is to articulate a Chinese identity based on the figure of English as
the language of Other, is translated into English? From the perspective
of reception, to what extent does translation elaborate or undermine the
ideological motivation behind the original Chinese works in question? And
as we have been looking at literary anthologies, a related question would
be: what is the function of translation in literary anthologies, specifically
those of a bilingual or multilingual nature? What role does translation play,
in the context of such anthologies, in the representation, negotiation and
construction of language power relations?
Translation studies in Singapore
In asking these questions, I seek to address cultural identity and language

power relations as a problematic of translation in multilingual Singapore. In
contemporary scholarship in language studies, Singapore is not an uncom-
mon research subject. Relevant monographs and journal articles abound
in a wide range of disciplines, including those of language variation, code-
switching, language identity and ownership, phonetics and phonology,
prosody, semantics, pragmatics and discourse, lexicography, language policy
and planning, education, child language acquisition, speech pathology and
creative/cultural expression.3 The main reason for this academic interest
3 For a comprehensive list of bibliographic sources on language-related (specifically,

English-language-related) research in Singapore, see Lim et al. (2010a: 283–303).
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is that the ethnic and linguistic diversity of Singapore presents interesting
challenges within its geopolitical context, prompting various attempts at
social engineering, including the institutionalisation of language policies in
the discursive construction of language roles, on the part of its government
(Lim et al. 2010b: 1). Yet given such a proliferation of language-based stud-
ies, there has been a dearth of systematic research on translation practice in
Singapore. Considering the abundance of translation activity taking place
in the city-state, this constitutes a lacuna in the literature.
This book is an attempt to fill this gap by exploring the relationship
between translation and language ideology in multilingual Singapore. Based
on data from literary translation and working against the background of lan-
guage power relations, I seek to describe and analyse the various interactions
that transpire between translation as cross-lingual practice/performance,
and the complex sociolinguistic dynamics in Singapore. In particular, the
implications of the socio-cultural tension between the English language
and the mother tongue languages (with an emphasis on Chinese) for the
textual operations, interpretive problems and discursive functions of literary
translation will be examined. Through this endeavour I hope to foreground
various issues arising from translation practice in a multilingual realm, with
a view to contributing to the extant literature on translation, power and
ideology from the perspective of multilingual Singapore. Before we pro-
ceed, it would be apt to brief ly review the language situation in Singapore,
which forms the background to the discussion that follows.
The sociolinguistics of Singapore, with special emphasis on

the relation between English and Chinese
In diglossic and polyglossic societies, the relation among various lan-

guages in use is characteristically sensitive, as dif ferent speech communities
attach dif ferent values to their respective languages or language varieties,
thus culminating in language ideologies (Spolsky 2004: 14). Such is the
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8 Chapter 1
case in Singapore, an ethnically and linguistically diverse society whose

population comprises three major ethnic groups: 75.7 per cent Chinese,
13.9 per cent Malay and 8.4 per cent Indian (Statistics Singapore 2006).
The remaining two per cent of the population falls under the category
labelled ‘Others’, which consists primarily of Eurasians and Europeans.
The four ethnic categories are sometimes represented by the acronym
CMIO (Chinese, Malay, Indian, Others). This ethnic constitution, and
its consequent linguistic plurality, has rendered the language issue a pre-
carious one in Singapore. It necessitates a language policy that reconciles
a heterogeneous range of cultural identities, each more or less embod-
ied in its respective language, with a homogeneous national identity. To
this end, the institutionalisation of four of ficial languages – English,
(Mandarin) Chinese, Malay and Tamil – has become a cornerstone policy
to maintain social stability and racial harmony among the various ethnic
communities in Singapore.4
The promotion of a multilingual and multicultural image is key to
Singapore’s language ideological enterprise, and since the city-state’s inde-
pendence in 1965, the government’s stance on language policy and lan-
guage planning has been to foreground this image. However, despite a
multilingual outlook, largely constructed through discursive instruments,
a critical examination of Singapore’s language policy and its implementa-
tion reveals the way in which the English language is privileged over the
mother tongue languages (Simpson 2007: 389), the latter term referring
to Chinese, Malay and Tamil.5 As neatly summarised by Pakir (1998: 96),
the English language plays three key roles in Singapore: utilitarian (being
used as a communicative tool between locals and foreigners in trade,
industry, law, administration, education and the media), unifying (being
the common language among dif ferent ethnic groups in Singapore) and
4 It is worth noting, however, that this demarcation of of ficial languages along ethnic
lines necessarily simplifies the sociolinguistic landscape in Singapore, as the number
of languages and language varieties, including dialects, actually spoken amounts to
approximately 30 (Bokhorst-Heng 2005).
5 The shorthand MTL (Mother Tongue Languages) is often used in discourses on
language education in Singapore.
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universal (being used in both private and public domains such as family,
friendship, education, employment, daily transactions, government and
law). The reason why English can perform such a diverse range of roles
in Singapore is that it is an ethnically neutral language (Lim et al. 2010b:
5–6), and ethnic neutrality is an essential property for a linguistic medium
that is to provide a common platform for the interaction of the various
tongues in the city-state. In the terms of Wee (2010: 109), English is con-
strued as ‘a language that essentially marks a non-Asian “other”’. Due to
its neutrality (by virtue of its being non-Chinese, non-Malay and non-
Tamil), and because of its dominant status in the international global
economy, English rose to become and still is today the de facto lingua
franca in Singapore. It is not only the working language in most sectors
of the society, but is also the sole medium of instruction at all levels of
education. English thus enjoys a status and prestige that is unparalleled
by any of the other of ficial languages.
Conceptually speaking, the imagining of the multilingual Singapore
entails an ideological positioning of languages along distinct functional
lines. As mentioned earlier, English is rationalised as the pragmatic lan-
guage of national survival in the world economy as well as the language of
inter-ethnic communication that transcends ethno-linguistic boundaries.
Table 1 illustrates these two major functions of English at three levels. The
role of English as the language of economic survival manifests itself at
both the international level, where English is used for trade, science and
technology; and at the individual level, where English is the primary lan-
guage to be mastered in schools and therefore the key to academic progress,
social mobility, economic competitiveness and socio-cultural distinction.
In addition, as English is neutral in terms of its ethnic af filiations, it plays
the important ideological role of facilitating inter-ethnic interaction at the
community level, a role that is central to the construction of the ‘imagined
(multilingual) community’ of Singapore, to borrow Anderson’s (1983/1991)
oft-quoted phrase.
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10 Chapter 1
Table 1: Pragmatic functions of the English language in Singapore*
Assumption about English Function of English
(1) National Level: international

language for trade, science, technology
English is the key to economic survival
(2) Individual Level: skills and training;
meritocracy
(3) Community Level: inter-ethnic

English is a neutral language
communication and racial harmony
* Adapted from Bokhorst-Heng (1999a: 8). The contents of this table were formulated
by Professor Jayakumar, former Minister of State (Law and Home Af fairs) in Singapore
and were originally published on 19 August 1982 in The Straits Times, the most authori-
tative English language newspaper in Singapore.
In contrast, the Chinese language, as well as the other mother tongue

languages, is until relatively recently constructed as the symbolic embodi-
ment of traditional (Chinese) culture and values.6 It constitutes the cul-
tural ballast of the Chinese community in Singapore, serving the needs
of intra-ethnic communication and the formation and maintenance of a
Chinese identity (Wee 2003). The imagining of what constitutes multilin-
gual Singapore is hence ‘based on a strict distinction between Asian and
Western languages and their associated values. According to this, while
Western languages, such as English, can and should be valued on eco-
nomic and technological grounds, it is only the Asian languages that can
fully provide Singaporeans with a sense of identity and values’ (Wee and
Bokhorst-Heng 2005: 166). Table 2 summarises this functional polarisa-
tion between English and Mandarin Chinese.
6 The management of Chineseness was a very sensitive issue in Singapore during
the decade after independence, and to some extent this is still the case today. For
a succinct analysis of the political, cultural and economic motivations behind the
conceptualisation of Chinese identity at dif ferent periods in Singapore’s history, see
Tan (2003).
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Table 2: Functional polarisation of Mandarin Chinese and English in Singapore*
Mandarin Chinese English
mother-tongue business; economics
cultural-ballast science; technology
cultural identity education
intra-ethnic communication; (ethnic) unity inter-ethnic communication
* Adapted from Bokhorst-Heng (1999a: 7).
By virtue of its pragmatic functions, the English language has taken

on an increasing presence in multilingual Singapore vis-à-vis the mother
tongue languages, and has become a source of language ideological con-
tention since the early days of the city-state’s independence. By the 1970s,
the government’s policy of promoting English as the working language in
Singapore had denigrated the relative value of the Chinese language in the
society in general, such that there existed a ‘Heartlander-Cosmopolitan
Divide’ (Tan 2002). Whereas the English-educated/English-speaking (the
‘Cosmopolitans’) were and indeed still are perceived as ‘the elites at the
centre of power and inf luence’, the Chinese-educated/Chinese-speaking
were the ‘Heartlanders’ relegated to the periphery of nation-building and
economic development (Tan 2002: 132, 2003: 759). As the dominant status
of English had become increasingly obvious, concerns were growing among
the Chinese community that the Chinese-educated and predominantly
Chinese-speaking Singaporeans would be severely disadvantaged in seeking
employment, as compared to their English-educated and predominantly
English-speaking counterparts (before the mid-1980s, English-medium
and Chinese-medium schools remained distinct from each other). Such
concerns were further exacerbated by the fact that Nanyang University
(known to locals as Nantah), the first and only Chinese-medium univer-
sity in Southeast Asia and the symbolic fortress of Chinese language and
culture in Singapore, was merged into the English-medium University of
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12 Chapter 1
Singapore in 1980. This move sounded the alarm among members of the
Chinese community, who interpreted the move ‘as another worrying sign
that Chinese language was being increasingly devalued’ (Simpson 2007:
381).7
The government further launched a massive exercise to convert
Chinese-medium (as well as Malay-medium and Tamil-medium) schools
into English-medium ones, an exercise that began in 1984 and was com-
pleted by 1987 (Bokhorst-Heng 1999a: 13). This was seen as signalling a
symbolic end to Chinese-based education in Singapore. Lee Kuan Yew
(2000: 146; cited in Dixon 2009: 28), who was prime minister of Singapore
from 1965 to 1990, recalled in his memoirs that the decision to change the
medium of instruction in schools elicited a negative response from a ‘hard
core of the Chinese-educated’ within the Chinese community, who were
(and, to some extent, still are) very sensitive to the language education
policies of the government:
To announce that all had to learn English when each race was intensely and pas-
sionately committed to its own mother tongue would have been disastrous. […]
Not wanting to start a controversy over language, I introduced the teaching of three
mother tongues, Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil, into English schools. […] To balance
this, I introduced the teaching of English in Chinese, Malay, and Tamil schools. Malay
and Indian parents welcomed this but increasing numbers preferred to send their
children to English schools. A hard core of the Chinese-educated did not welcome
what they saw as a move to make English the common working language, and they
expressed their unhappiness in the Chinese newspapers.
By labelling a sub-community of Chinese Singaporeans as the ‘hard core

of the Chinese-educated’, Lee discursively constructs an opposition based
on language background: the existence of ‘Chinese-educated’ (Chinese)
Singaporeans presupposes the existence of its other, i.e. ‘English-educated’
(Chinese) Singaporeans. As we will see later, this opposition is a dominant
trope in Chinese literary works in which the loss of Chinese identity is a
central thematic concern. It is not dif ficult to understand why this is the
7 For an account of the events leading to the merger and the controversies it generated
among the Chinese community in Singapore, see Gu (2004) and Li (2007: 309–22).
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case, for many (though by no means all) of the Chinese authors in question
are members of this ‘hard core of the Chinese-educated’ referred to by Lee.
As Chinese schools became defunct and the age of Chinese-based edu-
cation came to an end, the Chinese language was relegated to the status of a
language subject in mainstream schools – as opposed to that of a language
medium across subjects. Since then, the government has actively pursued
bilingualism in education, implementing what Kachru (1992) has termed
‘English-knowing bilingualism’. This means that students learn English as
their first language and have the option of learning their mother tongue
(i.e. one of Mandarin, Malay or Tamil, normally dependent on the eth-
nicity of one’s father) as either a first or second language, the latter being
the ‘default’ option. Thus, for the vast majority of Chinese Singaporean
students, Chinese is learnt as a second language in schools, even though
it is, not without some paradox, at the same time their of ficial ‘mother
tongue language’.
To understand the dynamics of language relations in Singapore, it is
important to take stock of this feature of the language education system
in Singapore: one’s supposed ‘native language’ (a term roughly equiva-
lent to ‘mother tongue’ in sociolinguistics, but is much less often heard in
Singapore) may not be the language that s/he feels most at ease with, nor
is it necessarily one that is used most often in school and/or at home. Thus,
when dealing with the relevant terms in the sociolinguistics literature, one
needs to bear in mind that they may require qualifications in the context
of Singapore. Some of the implicit assumptions that we have about certain
concepts like ‘native language’ or ‘mother tongue’, for instance, may not
apply. As mentioned earlier, due to the bilingual education policy, it is pos-
sible – indeed common – for a Chinese student to learn his/her mother
tongue language as a second rather than first language, with the former
being pegged at a lower standard. Consequently, despite (or, rather, because
of ) the policy of ‘English-knowing bilingualism’, English has become the
only language spoken confidently for many young Singaporeans (Lim and
Foley 2004: 6), including, of course, Chinese Singaporeans. Today, it is
not at all uncommon to find Chinese Singaporeans, especially those of the
younger generations educated under the bilingual policy, who struggle to
speak their mother tongue language with reasonable f luency. And to write
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14 Chapter 1
in Chinese is, as might be expected, an immensely dif ficult task for many

Chinese Singaporean students.
To illustrate how the bilingual education policy has taken its toll on
trends in language usage in Singapore, let us take a look at some relevant
of ficial statistics. Table 3 tracks the changes in the dominant home language
of Chinese Singaporeans (aged 5 and above) in the period 1980–2010. The
figures indicate the number of frequent speakers of a language as a percent-
age of the Chinese population.
Table 3: Most frequently spoken language at home among the Chinese population
(aged 5 and above) in Singapore (1980–2010)*
Language/Year 1980 1990 2000 2005 2010
English 10.2 19.3 23.9 28.7 32.6
Mandarin 13.1 30.1 45.1 47.2 47.7
Chinese Dialects 76.2 50.3 30.7 23.9 19.2
* Sources: Statistics Singapore (2001, 2006, 2011).
The figures above indicate that there has been an increase in the pro-
portion of Chinese Singaporeans who speak English most frequently at
home. However, one also notes a concurrent rise in the proportion of
dominant Mandarin speakers in the same time period, with a tremendous
increase of 32 per cent from 1980 to 2000. By 2010, the number of Mandarin
speakers was still higher than that of English speakers among the Chinese
population. This might seem to suggest that Mandarin is still the primary
language in Singapore, thus invalidating my earlier point about the rising
inf luence of English and declining use of Chinese.
In fact, the increase in the number of Mandarin speakers in the 30-year
period must be interpreted against the corresponding drastic fall in the
number of Chinese Singaporeans who speak dialects most frequently at
home. The decline in dialect speakership is the direct consequence of the
success of the Speak Mandarin Campaign, a national programme whose aim
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is to remove the communicative barriers within the Chinese community

by promoting Mandarin in place of several mutually unintelligible Chinese
dialects (Low and Brown 2005: 49; Bokhorst-Heng 1999b: 220–63). As
there is a strong genealogical relationship between the Chinese dialects
and Mandarin, Chinese dialect speakers (especially those of the older
generation) will generally shift towards the use of Mandarin rather than
def lect directly to English, which belongs to a dif ferent language family
altogether. By ‘def lection’, I mean a shift in one’s most frequently spoken
language at home. This does not imply, however, that one language will
necessarily erase another completely; rather, the dif ferent languages often
overlay one another partially. In the case of Singapore, English, Mandarin
and the Chinese dialects form a continuum of sociolinguistic shift, with dia-
lect speakers moving gradually towards the use of Mandarin and Mandarin
speakers migrating towards the camp of English speakers. In other words,
the significant rise in Mandarin speakership between 1980 and 2000 can
be accounted for by the rapid attrition in dialect speakership in the early
years of the Speak Mandarin Campaign.
This upward trend in Mandarin speakership is to lose its momentum
in the next ten years. As evident from Table 3, from 2000 to 2010, while
the number of English speakers increased by 8.7 per cent, that of Mandarin
speakers rose by a relatively conservative 2.6 per cent. At the same time,
dialect speakership continued to plunge, recording a sharp fall of 11.5 per
cent over the decade. It is thus possible to posit a generational shift towards
the use of English as the dominant language among Chinese Singaporeans
over the course of three decades (1980–2010), even though Mandarin still
constitutes a major language statistically. This hypothesis is corroborated by
the results of a survey commissioned by Singapore’s Ministry of Education
(2004). The survey reports that the number of Chinese students entering
Primary One who speak predominantly English at home has risen from
36 per cent in 1994 to 50 per cent in 2004 (ibid.: 22). This implies a cor-
responding fall in the number of Mandarin and Chinese dialect speakers
in the home environment. It is also reported that parents with higher edu-
cation are likely to use English rather than Mandarin with their children
at home. The report further finds a declining use of the Chinese language
among young students in their communication with siblings or friends,
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16 Chapter 1
and recognises that this trend of young Chinese children having limited
exposure to their mother tongue language at home will continue (ibid.).
The statistics above provide a sense of the asymmetric sociolinguis-
tic relations that have emerged in contemporary Singapore society. This
asymmetry is largely due to the functional polarisation between English
and Chinese mentioned earlier, which lies at the heart of the language
ideological structure in the city-state. Simpson (2007: 385; my emphasis)
aptly summarises this key sociolinguistic feature as follows:
due to sustained governmental support for English since independence and its pro-
motion for largely utilitarian reasons, English has now become the dominant lingua
franca of Singapore and has made substantial gains in use in a wide range of domains
of life in Singapore, from increased use in the home in part of the Chinese and Indian
communities to dominant public use in business, industry, law, politics, and educa-
tion. English, therefore changed from being the erstwhile language of a privileged,
wealthy group to become a broadly shared language spoken with enthusiasm by much
of the younger generation, and is seen to be so essential to employment opportuni-
ties and other aspects of daily life that its across-the-board usefulness may well pose
a future threat to the maintenance of other languages in Singapore.
While the functional polarity between English and Chinese is a socio-

linguistic reality, what is more important is really the perceived value of
the two languages in the psyche of Singaporeans. Borrowing the terms of
Bourdieu (1991), as Singapore seeks to progress itself economically, English
has come to possess a high degree of symbolic capital or symbolic power
as the pragmatic language that conditions access to prestigious universi-
ties and higher-paying jobs. In contrast, Mandarin Chinese, constructed
as the bastion of traditional Chinese culture and values, is perceived as
having less practical value and thus possesses a relatively low degree of
symbolic capital. In turn, the symbolic capital possessed by the Chinese
dialects would be lower than that of Mandarin, with the latter institution-
alised as an of ficial language and promoted through the Speak Mandarin
Campaign, at the expense of the dialects. Notwithstanding the fact that
ef forts have been made to reconceptualise Chinese identity towards a reas-
sertion of Chinese language and culture (Tan 2003), and that the image of
the Chinese language has been enhanced in relatively recent years along
with the rise of China as a global economic powerhouse, the hegemony
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of English and relative weakness of Chinese are palpable in most sectors
of Singapore society. Because of the symbolic power dif ferential between
the two languages (or, broadly speaking, between English and the mother
tongue languages), and due to the perceived ‘future threat’ that English
poses ‘to the maintenance of other languages’ (Simpson 2007: 385), notably
Chinese, ‘the issue of language in Singapore is continually highly charged
with emotion and concern’ (ibid.: 390).
The language issue is an emotional one because it is deeply implicated
in the articulation of cultural identity. In this regard, of ficial discourses
on language policy have contributed to the imagining of multilingualism
and multiculturalism by infusing languages with constructed dichoto-
mous values. Treating such discourses as narratives with an ideological
agenda, Wee and Bokhorst-Heng (2005: 164) assert that behind Singapore’s
mother tongue policy is a deep concern that ‘exposure to English can lead
Singaporeans to become increasingly “Westernized” or “decadent”’. The
cultural function of the mother tongue languages is thus invoked to pro-
vide Singaporeans ‘with links to their traditional cultures and values so
as to counter the ef fects of “Western decadence”’ (ibid.). As Wee and
Bokhorst-Heng have demonstrated through a close reading of speeches by
Singapore’s leaders on the occasion of the Speak Mandarin Campaign in
1984, 1988 and 1991, there has been a perennial emphasis on the positive
cultural values that the Chinese language embodies. The implication of
such narratives is that the English language, valued for its instrumental-
ist worth, is associated with negative ‘Western’ cultures and should not
be allowed to infiltrate the cultural self. To illustrate this further with a
relatively recent example, let us take a look at an excerpt from a speech at
the launching ceremony of the 2005 Speak Mandarin Campaign by Prime
Minister Lee Hsien Loong (Lee 2005; my emphasis):
Knowledge of Mandarin gives us a sense of identity and roots. It enables us to appreci-
ate and understand who we are and where we came from. It opens up a whole world
of Chinese art, culture and traditions, which spans thousands of years of Chinese
civilization. If we use only English, and allow our mother tongue to degenerate, we
will, in time, lose our values and cultural heritage. The nature of our society will change
for the worse. Ultimately, our self-confidence as a people will be undermined. Hence
quite apart from the economic reasons or the rise of China, we cannot af ford to lose
our mother tongue.
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18 Chapter 1
As the of ficial narrative goes, whereas Mandarin Chinese preserves the

time-honoured values and cultural heritage of the Chinese community,
English can bring about dire consequences if it were to become the only
language spoken by Singaporeans – ‘the nature of our society will change
for the worse’. This example demonstrates how a discursive link is con-
structed among language, identity and cultural values in public discourses
in Singapore. A great deal of stereotyping is involved in such discursive
construction, but the important point is that it is in operation in the imagi-
nation of multilingual Singapore. The opposition between the Chinese
language and the cultural heritage it embodies and the English language
and the corollary ‘decadent’ ef fects of Westernisation has also found its way
from public discourse into the Chinese literary imagination. Consequently,
the Chinese/heritage versus Western/decadence dichotomy has become a
central trope underlying a corpus of Chinese literary works that deal with
the Chinese cultural crisis, hinging on the theme of anglophobia: a fear of
the hegemonic English language and the decadent West.
Translation and language power relations:

Methodological considerations
It is against this sociolinguistic backdrop that this book will be discussing

issues relating to translation and language power relations. In this connec-
tion, ideology, specifically language ideology, is a core underlying notion.
The term ‘ideology’ has come to assume an eclectic range of senses in the
literature emanating from a number of disciplines. These encompass both
neutral connotations in the senses of ‘worldview’ and ‘culture’, as well as
negative ones in politically charged contexts (Calzada Pérez 2003b: 3–6;
Munday 2007: 196–7; Fawcett and Munday 2009: 137). In this study,
the term refers to the knowledge, beliefs and value systems of the indi-
vidual and the society in which s/he operates (van Dijk 1998), and which
serves to ‘establish and sustain relations of power which are systematically
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asymmetrical’ (Thompson 1990: 7). Language ideology, by extension

then, is the knowledge, beliefs, assumptions, expectations and values held
by groups of people about language use, language values, language users,
language contact and, of course, translation in a particular geo-political
and institutional context (Meylaerts 2007: 298). It also establishes and
maintains asymmetrical power relations among languages. In short, lan-
guage ideology is an abstract socio-cultural construct about the political,
economic and cultural values that languages carry and is closely bound to
issues of identity and power (ibid.: 299).
Another relevant term in this regard is ‘language power’, which in
this book is taken to mean the symbolic power assumed by a language
in a given sociolinguistic context. Symbolic power, à la Bourdieu, is the
measure of social capital accorded to a language in a specific socio-cultural
context, that is,
the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a
durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaint-
ance or recognition – or in other words, to membership in a group – which provides
each of its members with the backing of the collectively owned capital, a ‘credential’
which entitles them to credit, in the various senses of the word. (Bourdieu 1986: 249)
The concept of language power entails the important assumption that
in multilingual contexts, languages often assume dif ferent statuses in the
sociolinguistic polysystem (Even-Zohar 2005).
It is the contention of this book that translation is a textual and dis-
cursive practice embedded in competing cultural identities and language
ideologies; it is a site through which we can observe the operations and
implications of language power. The present work focuses on the power
relation between the English language and the Chinese language in multi-
lingual Singapore and contemplates the problems of literary translation as
seen through the lens of such relation. This topic necessitates engagement
with the rich bank of scholarship on the intertwining themes of transla-
tion and power, ‘power’ being the manifestation of ideology (Cunico and
Munday 2007b: 141). This productive line of scholarship has proliferated
since the end of the last century, primarily through the publication of sev-
eral edited volumes on the subject (Álvarez and Vidal Claramonte 1996;
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20 Chapter 1
von Flotow 2000; Gentzler and Tymoczko 2002; Calzada-Pérez 2003a;

Bermann and Wood 2005; Cunico and Munday 2007a). In light of the
heightening concern with the implication of translation for power relations
(and vice versa), researchers have come to contextualise bilingual practices
in ideologically charged environments, where translation is seen as a con-
tested zone that negotiates power relations between two or more languages
representing dif ferent and sometimes conf licting socio-cultural identities.
One of the prominent themes that has emerged from ideological stud-
ies of translation is its connection to ‘the concept of language and power
relations and the distortion and rewriting of the source text and culture in
the process of translation’ (Fawcett and Munday 2009: 138). Within this
paradigm, translators assume the role of cultural mediators who actively
intervene in the interpretation of a source text (ST) embedded in a spe-
cific socio-cultural context and in its (re)presentation and transmission to
a target audience situated in a dif ferent context of culture and reception.
Translational shifts at the level of the text can therefore be potentially
explained in terms of ideologically motivated manipulations on the part of
translators, who work within their personal/professional habitus (Simeoni
1998), and within the larger system of patronage (Lefevere 1992: 11–25).
By virtue of the ideologically determined selections made by translators,
translation is seen not as a faithful copy of a certain ST, but as a metonymic
or partial representation of the latter (Tymockzo 1999: 41–61; Gentzler
and Tymoczko 2002: xviii). Some scholars even go as far as to suggest that
any translation is necessarily ideological in nature (Schäf fner 2003: 23).
This pervasive theme of treating translators as active cultural agents – as
opposed to passive scribes – finds its roots in the ‘Manipulation School’. The
term refers to the scholarship tradition named after a landmark publication
edited by Hermans (1985), which subsequently led to a major paradigm
shift characterised by a cross-breeding of the study of translation and the
study of culture and ideology. In the field of translation studies, this para-
digm shift is famously known as the ‘cultural turn’, notably pioneered by,
inter alia, Lefevere and Bassnett in their seminal volume of 1990. Indeed,
‘manipulation’ was, and arguably still remains, a very fashionable expres-
sion – an academic buzz word in some sense – within ideological studies
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of translation, underlining the central tenet that ‘all translation implies a
degree of manipulation of the ST for a certain purpose’ (Hermans 1985: 11).
Over the past three decades, the cultural turn – including its of fshoots,
such as the ‘ideological turn’ (Leung 2006) – has gained immense popu-
larity in translation studies. But scholars have also noted problems with
research conducted along these lines. For instance, Fawcett and Munday
(2009: 137), citing one of Gadamer’s (1975) signature concepts, question
the unrestrained use of ‘ideology’ to explain ‘what is only our “life-world”,
our concrete human situation’. This problem is in part due to the dif ficulty
involved in defining and categorising the concept of ideology. As noted
earlier, the term ‘ideology’ covers a wide spread of senses. Indeed the notion
of ‘ideology’ has become so clichéd in translation studies and its adjacent
disciplines that it sometimes loses its material meaning and is not neces-
sarily well-substantiated (Fawcett 1998/2001: 138). ‘Ideology’ has come to
be used as a convenient catch-phrase to capture the myriad extra-textual
phenomena surrounding a translation, so much so that pretty much eve-
rything beyond the text is inf lected with ideological content in some way,
is necessarily motivated by some agent, and is perceived as having palpable
textual repercussions on the translation. The numerous case studies pur-
sued along this line of research seem to suggest that power and ideological
factors often do lead to distortions and manipulations in translations. In
other words, textual divergences between a target text (TT) and its cor-
responding ST are at least partially, if not chief ly, attributable to cultural
dif ferences and ideological motivations.
More recently, Robinson (2011: 12) advances the notion of sway – ‘a
wide variety of forces or impulses’ that move translators towards a cer-
tain orientation in their translation. This is done through discursive chan-
nels, such as ideologically driven narratives, as explored in Baker (2006).
Robinson’s theory is a neat one, but is essentially an instantiation of the tra-
dition set down by the Manipulation School in its interest in the inf luence
or sway ‘wielded by large-scale ideological orientations over individual
decision-making’ (ibid.: 14). That there is an extremely rich pool of empiri-
cal evidence in support of the manipulation/sway hypothesis is beyond any
doubt. But the point of departure for this line of research is typically, if not
always, some kind of visible discrepancy in the TT vis-à-vis the ST and/or
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22 Chapter 1
another TT. Robinson (2011: 1–7), for instance, starts of f with ‘erroneous’
errors made by Bible translators – errors which are not so much inadvertent
mistakes as they are the product of some kind of religious-ideological ‘sway’.
So are critiques of domestication often based on the visible phenomenon
of naturalisation of the ST by translators (Venuti 2008a), or on the com-
parison of two given translations that display radically dif ferent textual
dispositions (Venuti 2008b).8
Is manipulation or ‘sway’ the only perspective from which we can con-
template the relationship between translation practice and power/ideol-
ogy? As attractive as uncovering textual manoeuvres with some conceivable
ideological motivation may be to translation studies scholars, the fact is
that textual divergences of a telling nature do not always exist in translated
texts in any substantial manner; that is, visible and systematic dif ferences
between STs and TTs are not a given phenomenon. The impression given
by existing work on cultural studies of translation seems to be that such
dif ferences are there in the text to be uncovered by the meticulous researcher
and explained from the manipulation perspective. There are, however,
many cases of translated texts that do not demonstrate shifts beyond a
purely linguistic level. Thus, a comparison of parallel texts with the hope
of excavating theoretically significant discrepancies, including conspicuous
additions, omissions and conversions of textual material in the passage from
source to target texts and cultures, can often be frustrated by the failure
to produce convincing findings. This was the impasse I encountered in
attempting to think through the problems arising from literary transla-
tion in Singapore, taking as my point of departure the manipulation thesis.
Accordingly, one would have hypothesised the presence of some significant
departure in the translations that could be labelled ‘rewriting’ (Lefevere
1992) and then (rather conveniently) attributed to some ideological nar-
rative writ large. However, the corpus of translated texts available to me
all seem rather ‘innocuous’ – one would have liked to see some culturally
8 See Robinson (2011, chapter 5), for his critique of Venuti’s (2008b) analysis of two
translations of Dostoevsky.
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interesting dif ferences amenable to broad strokes of contextual analysis,

but much to my dismay that just did not happen.
I am not in any way invalidating the manipulation/sway approach to
researching translation. Both the methodology and epistemology relating
to this enterprise are valid, but my data on hand just did not support this
well-trodden path of analysis. As mentioned earlier, there are no systematic
shifts in my texts that can reasonably betray the translators’ ideological
intents and/or cultural dif ferences between the source and target cultures.
Even though my topic is located within the same general domain, that is,
translation, power and ideology, the textual material has failed to provide
me with the ‘usual’ answers. But that does not mean there are no ideologi-
cal issues in the translation that we see being practised and published in
Singapore. As a native Singaporean treading both English and Chinese as
first languages, I have long been consciously aware that there is something
inherently problematic about translation in respect to the language power
relations that exist in this multilingual society. Knowing that recourse to
the concepts of manipulation was not empirically feasible (at least as far as
textual analysis was concerned) and that a dif ferent route of methodologi-
cal thinking might therefore be required, I decided that I had to revisit the
fundamentals of the problem at hand.
Identifying the problems
The first problem is the existence of the bilingual literary text, the product
of code-switching in writing. It has been earlier mentioned that there is a
corpus of Chinese literary works that explore the Chinese cultural crisis in
Singapore. In these works, code-switching into English serves as a rhetorical
device which Chinese-language authors employ to portray, often negatively,
English-speaking Chinese Singaporeans who cannot speak their mother
tongue proficiently. The question that arises is what becomes of this lin-
guistic hybridity when the Chinese texts are translated into English for an
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24 Chapter 1
anglophone readership. What are the textual compromises that need to take
place and what are their implications for the rhetorical meaning encoded
in code-switching in the ST? The simple answer is this: almost invariably,
the embedded English segments in the Chinese STs are retained in their
original forms and italicised in the corresponding English translations.
Technically speaking, the issue does not seem to be of particular interest
at first. Retention of the English segments would seem to be an obvious
strategy in this case and italicisation is likely the best possible paratextual
compensation to highlight the foreignness of the code-switched segments.
However, when the STs and TTs are juxtaposed, a textual uneasiness dwells
in the space between them. As the hybridity of the Chinese ST becomes
homogenised into a monolingual English TT, conceptual problems arise
as regards literary heterolingualism in translation and its implications for
the articulation of language identity. How does the treatment of literary
heterolingualism in translation mediate the relationship between English
and Chinese, and how may this be related to the language situation in
Singapore? By locating this translational phenomenon within a broader
language ideological context, is it possible to read an apparently inevitable
textual manoeuvre as being indexical of the relative power between the
languages involved in translation?
The second problem has to do with reception and interpretation.
Here I am still interested in literary works that deal with the theme of the
Chinese cultural crisis in contemporary Singapore, though this time my
concern is interpretive rather than textual. In the literary works in question,
the English language and its associated culture are often constructed as the
Other. English-speaking Chinese Singaporeans are portrayed as characters
who have forgotten their cultural roots; in the eyes of Chinese-speaking
Chinese Singaporeans, these characters are thus simultaneously familiar
(in terms of their ethnicity) and foreign (in terms of their linguistic and
cultural dispositions). Interpretive dif ficulties arise when these Chinese
works with a clear language ideological agenda – that of critiquing the
English language hegemony – are translated into English for an anglo-
phone audience. Specifically, there are ethical implications when these
works are translated for English-speaking Chinese Singaporean readers,
given that the latter are cast as the cultural Other in the original Chinese
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texts. The interest here lies in the epistemological dilemma involved in the
translation of cultural consciousness, whereby the subjectivity of the TT
reader is implicated in the discursive constitution of identity in the ST.
How should we come to terms with the concept of Otherness in transla-
tion, when the language of the cultural Other (as represented in the ST)
becomes the very language of the translated text? In other words, how are
anglophone Chinese readers supposed to read their own cultural identity
in translation? Are they the Self or the Other, or both?
Most of the literary translations that form the initial basis of my study
come from bilingual or multilingual literary anthologies. My third prob-
lem with translation in Singapore emanates from my observation of these
anthologies. Anthologies are an interesting entity in Singapore, especially
those published as of ficial representations of the city-state’s much-valorised
multilingualism and multiculturalism. Anthologies published to mark
historical or cultural events, for instance, to commemorate the nation’s
anniversary or to promote a national reading campaign, become a site where
the imagining of multilingual Singapore is played out. In order to enact this
imagination, many of these anthologies purport to represent the four of ficial
languages. This is where translation comes into the picture: it provides
a common platform for cross-cultural or inter-cultural communication,
which is central to the discursive enterprise of constructing multilingual
Singapore. I used the phrase ‘purport to represent’ for a reason, and that
is the core of the issue here. In representing multilingual Singapore by way
of anthologisation, the four languages are not necessarily in a symmetric
relationship with one another. For example, an anthology that collects lit-
erary works originally written in four languages could appear in only one
language, and that is English. And it is through translation that this could
happen – when literary works written in Chinese, Malay and Tamil are
represented in English translation only, and when translation takes place
in one direction, that is, into the hegemonic language. Alternatively, an
anthology may choose to represent the literature written in each of the
four languages in the original language in addition to translations into the
other three languages. Other configurations are possible, and in each case
translation functions as a crucial mediating instrument. How is transla-
tion related to language identity in the context of literary anthologies?
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26 Chapter 1
What role does translation play in the discursive management of language
power relations in multilingual anthologies? How might dif ferent models
of translational relationship in anthologies tell us about the way in which
language relations have shifted in Singapore?
The myriad issues delineated above entail dif ferent levels of the trans-
lation process, namely, textual, interpretive and discursive, and therefore
cannot be encapsulated by a single theoretical framework. It is for this
reason that a more eclectic approach has been adopted in this book, where
each of the three aspects is treated by a dif ferent conceptual tool. The three
aspects are drawn together by their common implication in the charac-
teristically asymmetric relationship between languages in contemporary
Singapore, and in how they elucidate the cultural politics of translation in
the city-state. The objective of this inquiry is to initiate a rethinking about
bi/multi-literate representations and language power, and to unpack the
ideological implications of translation practices. As such, the method used
is primarily conceptual and philosophical, though as much as possible data
has been provided in the form of textual and paratextual examples to sup-
port the relevant arguments.
While theoretical research in translation studies is valuable in and
of itself (Zhang 2010: 73–4), the problems arising from such research,
including age-old issues such as ‘untranslatability’, need not terminate
as ‘problems’ as such. Though it would be far-fetched to expect highly
theoretical issues to be immediately usable to practitioners working at the
frontline, it is possible to integrate some of these issues into the enterprise
of thinking translation, which is just about as important as practising trans-
lation. To this end, although the present work is primarily contemplative
in nature, and may therefore raise more questions that it can answer, the
pragmatic implication of the study to the teaching and learning of inter-
cultural communication will also be touched upon. It is believed that at
this juncture in human history where cultural conf licts have become an
increasing threat to peace and stability, the need for such communication
is ever more pertinent.
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Outline of the book
This chapter has set down the context of the study by providing a brief
survey of the language situation in Singapore and by proposing to query
the cultural politics behind literary translation on the textual, interpretive
and discursive planes. In the following, I consider the translation problem-
atic in Singapore in three main chapters. In these chapters, I invoke the
notion of language power relation to complicate the reading of Chinese/
English translations and translation anthologies as biliterate and multilit-
erate practices respectively.
Chapter 2 deals with the textual problem of translating the bilingual
literary text. Here I examine what happens when texts written in Chinese,
and which strategically employs code-switching into English for rhetorical
purposes, are translated into English. By tapping into the social semiotics
of language variation and by drawing on existing research on literary het-
erolingualism in translation, the chapter postulates that bilingual texts in
translation play out a linguistic tension, the implication of which stretches
far beyond the boundaries of the text. The chapter further looks at an
asymmetry with regards the use of bilingual codes in the parallel works
of a self-translating playwright. It is suggested that the dif ference in the
degree of heterolingualism between English-to-Chinese and Chinese-to-
English translation has an ideological significance when read in the context
of language power in Singapore.
Chapter 3 takes an interpretive turn on literary works that explore the
theme of the Chinese cultural crisis in Singapore. Taking the perspective
of the hypothetical reader, I analyse how these literary works should or
could be received in translation. Drawing on ethical approaches to transla-
tion studies as well as reception studies, the chapter critiques the tenability
of these literary works in English translation in respect to their intended
function. I propose in this chapter what I would call an epistemological
dilemma in translation, which is engendered through the reading of Self as
cultural Other, and vice versa. The dilemma points to how a consideration
of the power relationship between source and target languages can prob-
lematise the reading of Chinese identity in English translation in Singapore.
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28 Chapter 1
In Chapter 4, I move from literary texts to literary anthologies in which

such texts are collected. Heterolingual literary anthologies are a major
institution in Singapore, not merely with literary-aesthetic motivations,
but also (even primarily) as an embodiment of language ideology. This
chapter argues that translation is a discursive instrument that mediates and
constructs language relations in heterolingual anthologies. By examining
the shifting nature of translation in anthologies published over a span of
more than two decades, the chapter theorises on the function of translation
in the negotiation of language power in Singapore. Building on concepts
from sociological theories of translation, especially the notion of literary
translation as exchange in cultural capital, I suggest that translation manages
the power relationship between various languages in literary anthologies
through the parameters of visibility and directionality.
The final chapter concludes by proposing how we might attempt to
‘think translation’ on the basis of the issues addressed in the preceding
chapters. By ‘thinking translation’, I refer not primarily to philosophical
ruminations (which are of course also meaningful in and of themselves)
but rather to contemplations about the direct implication of theoretical
issues for cross-cultural communication in specific contexts. Under what
kinds of cultural condition does a translational problem arise? Is there a
readily available ‘solution’, textual or otherwise, to this problem; if not,
can we invent such a solution? The emphasis is not on finding a tenable
solution to translational problems arising from ideological contexts, but
rather on how we can dovetail such problems into a nuanced understand-
ing of our (inter)cultural condition. By turning theoretical problems into
conceptual windows through which we can enhance our understanding of
the nature and issues involved in translation, it is suggested that the field
of translation studies can contribute towards the paradigmatic shift from
cross-cultural communication to inter-cultural communication.
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Chapter 2
The Bilingual Text in Translation:

Paradoxes and Asymmetries
The paradox of the code
Bilingual literary texts are a nemesis to translators by virtue of the consti-
tution of their textuality. A bilingual literary text is one that contains two
language codes. The two codes may be equally prominent within the text
or, as in most cases of literary heterolingualism, one code may be primary
– hence forming the ‘central axis’ of the text – and the other embedded
and therefore secondary (Grutman 2009: 183). In this chapter I examine
literary texts from Singapore that belong to the latter category. Chinese
constitutes the central axis in these texts, in which there is additionally a
‘sprinkling’ of English words, phrases or clauses. In all cases of translating
bilingual texts, there is the perennial problem of how the asymmetrical
textual relationship between the matrix and embedded languages may be
treated. This problem is exacerbated, as in our case, when the embedded
language in the ST becomes the central axis of the TT, in other words,
when the bilingual text is translated into the very language that codes its
embedded segments.
Let us identify the problem by way of considering a fictional work
by the prolific Singaporean writer Liang Wern Fook. This is a short piece
with the title Wenhua jiaoliu, translated into English as Cultural Exchange
and collected in KIV (St André 2002a: 99–102), one of three bilingual
literary anthologies published by the Department of Chinese Studies
of the National University of Singapore. This is a story about cultural
alienation among the younger generation of Chinese Singaporeans. A
Chinese-language teacher announces to a class of students (presumably
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30 Chapter 2
during a Chinese-language class) that a group of American high school

students on a cultural exchange programme will be attending lessons
in their school the following month. The news sent the students abuzz,
and they volunteer to serve as ambassadors to show their new American
friends around Singapore.
The Chinese-language teacher then asks the students to write down
the names of places of interest they would strongly recommend to the
American exchange students. One student presents this teacher with the
names of three places of interest, all written in English. In the original
Chinese text, the names appear as follows:
1. Takashimaya
2. Mac Donald [sic]
3. Boat Quay
Having read the list, the Chinese-language teacher reprimands the stu-
dent for his ‘writing and giving of an English list to a Chinese-language
teacher’, an action the teacher deems ‘absurd’. The student, whose earlier
list has been rejected, returns shortly with a hanyu pinyin (a Romanisation
system based on Mandarin Chinese) version of the above Chinese names.
The romanised names appear as follows in the Chinese text:
1. Gaodaowu
2. Maidanglao
3. Bochuanmatou
In explaining his use of the romanised forms, the student confesses that
he is unable to write the Chinese characters representing those words.
However, the hanyu pinyin version, which uses the Roman alphabet as
does English, is still unacceptable to the Chinese-language teacher, who
insists that the student look up the words in a Chinese dictionary and
reproduce them in the Chinese script. Finally, the student writes down
the names of the same three places in the Chinese script, which appear as
follows in the Chinese text:
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1. 高岛屋
2. 麦当劳
3. 驳船码头
In the final turn of the story, the teacher, now satisfied with what the
student has produced, asks him what he intends to do with his American
friend at Boat Quay, to which the student replies: ‘We are going to have
Mexican food there’.
Some explanation is required here of the cultural connotations of this
work, which may elude the non-native reader. What is the significance of
the student’s final suggestion to have Mexican food with an American stu-
dent? Immediately obvious here is the paradox of a Chinese Singaporean
bringing an American for Mexican food (i.e. ‘Western’ food in the very
general sense of the word), but what is the implication of this paradox?
Recall that the American students in question are supposed to be on a
‘cultural’ exchange programme in Singapore, which begs the question:
what kind of ‘culture’ is representative of this city-state? The answer lies
in the three locations provided by the student in the story. Takashimaya
is a famous shopping mall in Singapore with Japanese origins; this could
hint at the inf luence of a more general consumerist culture and of Japanese
culture in Singapore. McDonald’s is, of course, the icon of the hegemonic
American food culture that figures prominently in globalisation studies.
Finally, Boat Quay is a well-known tourist spot in Singapore, most famous
for its bars and pubs and frequented by Caucasian tourists.
What the three locations suggest is that, in the eyes of a young Chinese
Singaporean, the concept of culture has a predominantly ‘Western’ ring to
it – one notes a stark lack of ‘Chineseness’ in this culture. Given that the
story unfolds in the course of an interaction between a Chinese-language
teacher and a Chinese student, and that the story itself is written in Chinese,
this lack constitutes a central concern of the text. The paradox of a Chinese
Singaporean wanting to bring an American to the three locations in the
name of ‘cultural exchange’ points to a cultural predicament facing the
Chinese community in Singapore. More specifically, the story critiques
the impending loss of a Chinese consciousness among young Chinese
Singaporeans, which underlies ‘feelings of crisis and a siege mentality among
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32 Chapter 2
the Chinese-speaking community’ (St André 2006a: 35) and ‘the contem-
porary crisis in traditional Chinese culture among Singaporean Chinese’
(St André 2001: 11). The Chinese-language teacher rejects both the English
and the hanyu pinyin lists, insisting instead on the use of Chinese charac-
ters. This insistence points to an anxiety on the part of the core Chinese
community about the loss of the Chinese language and, consequently, the
attrition of the culture it embodies. In this respect the story is exemplary of
Singapore Chinese literary works that employ the motif of loss, a concept
introduced in the previous chapter.
It is on the basis of this understanding that the textual operations in
this text become meaningful. There is quite a bit of code-switching in the
story, first and foremost in the form of the three English words denoting
three locations, as written down by the student. These are followed by the
pinyin romanised version of the names of the same three locations, which
are arguably also a type of code-switching by virtue of their orthographic
markedness in the Chinese text. The story hinges on the dissatisfaction of
the teacher with the student’s unwillingness and incapacity to write in the
Chinese language. This imbues the English code in this Chinese text with
a certain indexical value: English represents the language of Other, from
the perspective of the Chinese-language teacher. The textual function of
the English and hanyu pinyin segments as representing the language of
Other stands in high relief when these segments are contrasted with the
three names eventually written in the Chinese script. The teacher is pleased
with this Chinese list, for it is written in the language of the (Chinese)
Self. The underlying assumption here is that there should be congruence
between ethnic identity and linguistic identity, and the teacher has evi-
dently imposed this notion on the student. The student, by virtue of his
being ethnically Chinese, is therefore expected to write in Chinese rather
than in English. The discursive construction of Self and Other in the story
therefore pivots on a contrast in language codes. The English code is for-
eign and Other insofar as it is embedded within a Chinese text, in which
the Chinese code, by default, represents Self.
The question arises then as to what happens to this text in English
translation, particularly to the embedded English and romanised seg-
ments. As one might expect, these segments are retained as they are in the
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translation, blending into the rest of the English TT, except for their being
set apart with the italic type. Thus, in the translated text, the first list of
names originally written in English appears as follows:
1. Takashimaya
2. Mac Donald
3. Boat Quay
And the second list encoded in pinyin romanisation is similarly reproduced:
1. Gaodaowu
2. Maidanglao
3. Bochuanmatou
Italicisation is, of course, a common paratextual technique used by trans-

lators to f lag out the foreignness of a piece of text, the alternative option
being the use of bold typography. But the use of a dif ferent typography is
more of a last resort; if anything, it points to how the textual predicament
caused by the bilingual ST cannot be overcome by textual means. Here
I agree with Grutman (2006: 37; my emphasis) that the overuse of ital-
ics (and footnotes, for that matter) burdens the translated text ‘with too
many distracting devices, while still failing to convey linguistic dif ferences’.
Linguistic dif ference does stand out in our English translation with the
third list of names, written originally in Chinese and appearing exactly as
it is (without italics) in the English translation:
1. 高岛屋
2. 麦当劳
3. 驳船码头
Is there not a paradox with the English translation here? On the one hand,
the English and hanyu pinyin segments, which are the embedded elements
in the original Chinese text, are fused into the translated text, where English
now forms the new central axis. On the other hand, the list of Chinese
names, which is initially an integral part of the ST, now stands out as a
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34 Chapter 2
foreign insertion in the English translation. By suggesting that there might

be a paradox with the translation, I am not critiquing the translator for
his/her lack of skills. Indeed, the translator could not have done any better
in this case, given the bilingual nature of the ST and the identity of the
translating language as the embedded code in this ST. As far as the three
segments in English, hanyu pinyin and Chinese respectively are concerned,
no interlingual transfer has taken place. This is, in a sense, inevitable, for
neither translating the first two lists into Chinese (or, for that matter, into
any other language) nor translating the third list into English would be
quite feasible. The setting, characters and story line of the text remain the
same in translation: we still have a Chinese-language teacher nagging at
a Chinese student to write in the Chinese language, except that this time
everyone is speaking English.
As mentioned earlier, the use of italicisation does not ensure that the
readers of our English translation will necessarily appreciate the marked-
ness of the English code in the original Chinese work. But reader recep-
tion is not the chief concern of this chapter (see Chapter 3). Here we are
interested in the language code per se, particularly in the social-semiotic
meaning invested in each code, what happens to this meaning in transla-
tion, and how this might prompt us to think critically about translation
– not in terms of its technical operations, but in terms of how it negotiates
the relationship between the languages involved. The central questions are
these: what is the textual consequence of translating an embedded code
into itself ? Beyond the technicalities, how should we begin to engage the
bilingual text in translation, given that the two languages in question are
in an ideological conf lict in both the fictional and sociolinguistic worlds?
The social semiotics of code-switching in translation
The bilingual text is an instantiation of what has more generally been

known as heterolingualism or polyglossia, a literary phenomenon where two
or more typologically dif ferent languages co-exist within a single piece of
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discourse (Grutman 2006), ‘the simultaneous presence of two or more

national languages interacting within a single cultural system’ (Bakhtin
1981: 431). A related but dif ferent concept is that of heteroglossia – the
English rendition of Bakhtin’s raznorechie, literally ‘dif ferentspeechness’
– that refers to the presence of dif ferent speech registers within a single
language. To Bakhtin (ibid.: 67), heteroglossia is the condition of internal
linguistic diversification and stratification that every national language
possesses, and is characteristic of the novelistic genre.
The textual condition of heterolingualism or heteroglossia in any given
piece of discourse has socio-cultural implications beyond the text itself.
It points to language as a heterogeneous entity marked by ‘a multiplicity
of social voices’ (ibid: 263), which ‘struggle and evolve in an environment
of social heteroglossia’ (ibid.: 292). Thus, the textual-linguistic tension in
a text marked by heterogeneity embodies the struggle between dominant
and non-dominant uses of a national language and can be seen as a textu-
alisation of social conf lict:
Thus at any given moment of its historical existence, language is heteroglot from top
to bottom: it represents the coexistence of socio-ideological contradictions between
the present and the past, between dif ferent epochs of the past, between dif ferent
socio-ideological groups in the present, between tendencies, schools, circles and so
forth, all given a bodily form. (Bakhtin 1981: 291)
The bilingual text is generally the product of code-switching in written

discourse. Code-switching has for long been an area of linguistic interest,1
though early research did not recognise it in its own right, seeing it instead
as an aberration of and deviance from well-formed speech (Weinreich
1953; Haugen 1956). Later researchers began to systematically study the
1 One perennial source of contention in the literature is the distinction between code-
switching and code-mixing. Several attempts have been made to dif ferentiate the
two concepts. The commonly held distinction is that while code-switching is inter-
sentential, code-mixing is intra-sentential (Bokamba 1989: 278; Sridhar and Sridhar
1980: 408–9; Kachru 1978: 28). For the purposes of this study, a distinction between
inter-sentential and intra-sentential switching is not pertinent; ‘code-switching’ hence
serves as an adequate cover-term to designate both types of switching phenomena.
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36 Chapter 2
motivations behind code-switching, treating it as a natural conversational

phenomenon among bilinguals or multilinguals (Myers-Scotton and Ury
1977; Sridhar 1978; Poplack 1980; Grosjean 1982; Kamwangamalu 1989;
Myers-Scotton 1993). In the Singapore context, scholars have noted how
code-switching is a communicative device that bilingual and multilingual
speakers turn to when they wish to activate certain discourse functions,
such as clarification and elucidation (Pakir 1989), or when they wish to
inject a local f lavour into their locution in the form of ‘cultural borrow-
ings’ from another language (Lee 2003).
Studies on code-switching in written discourse have been relatively
scarce, as compared to those that draw on speech data. There have been
some attempts at analysing the phenomenon in fictional works, demon-
strating that literature too provides useful data in this respect. The extant
studies have dif ferent emphases, some on the structural properties of
code-switching (Timm 1978; Callahan 2004), some on its mimetic func-
tion (Omole 1987; Camarca 2005). Importantly, code-switching has been
shown to signal sociolinguistic relations in fiction. For example, in analysing
the symbolic meaning of English in the Kenyan novel Dar Imenihadaa,
Blommaert (1993) contends that English is used in dialogues to express
negative judgements about Western culture. Similarly, Alzevedo (1993)
explores the sociolinguistic relation between Catalan and Spanish through
an analysis of code-switching in Catalan literature, positing that code-
switching constitutes a kind of marked speech requiring an interpretation
of its sociolinguistic and culture-specific meaning. Specifically, there is an
implicit association of the superordinate language with the negative quali-
ties of an oppressive regime.2
The problem of translating bilingual texts has been treated in relatively
recent translation studies research (Boggs 2004; Craig 2006; Lionnet
2003; Meylaerts 2006; Millán-Varela 2004; Thomson 2004; Wheeler
2003). Here the focus is not on the technicalities involved in dealing with
code-switching in the texts, but rather on the identity issues that emanate
2 See also Hess (1996) and Gordon and Williams (1998) for examples on the interplay
between code-switching and identity.
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from the treatment of bilingualism in specific political and ideological

contexts. In this regard, Mezei (1998) presents an intriguing discussion
of the cultural politics of translating a bilingual poem in the language
ideological context of Québec, the only Canadian province whose sole
of ficial language is French. Speak White is a French-language poster-poem
written by Michèle Lalonde in 1968 to promote the Québec nationalist
agenda of protecting a French-based identity against the hegemony of the
English language and of asserting Québec’s independence from Canada.
The poem employs code-switching from French into English at strategic
points to ‘mirror class distinctions and the political, cultural and linguistic
subordination of the Québécois’, ‘the economic subjugation of the work-
ing class Québécois to an anglophone managerial class’ (Mezei 1998: 236).
The linguistic tension in the poem thus textualises the ideological conf lict
between francophone and anglophone Canadians and evokes a broader
encounter of competing national and linguistic identities. The outcome
is a hybridity laced with ideological dif ference, or what Mezei variously
calls ‘negative bilingualism’ (ibid.: 236) and ‘confrontational bilingualism’
(ibid.: 239). In other words, the poem launches a nationalist critique against
English imperialism by juxtaposing French as the language of Québec and
English as the code of the imperialist Other, with the latter serving as ‘the
key metaphor of oppression’ (ibid.).
Mezei (ibid.: 235) argues that the relationship between French and
English in the poem constitutes a ‘literary diglossia’ – here Grutman might
prefer ‘heterolingualism’ instead – that ref lects the unequal power rela-
tionship between the two languages in Québec. The bilingualism that
characterises the text recalls a conf lictual bilingual society, one in which
the two languages are charged with socio-ideological overtones. What hap-
pens when this anti-anglophone French poem is translated into English?
Mezei (ibid.: 239; my emphasis) astutely points out the ‘potent irony’ in
this act of translation:
There is potent irony in translating ‘Speak White’ into English given that the sub-
ject of the poem is Quebec as ‘une culture traduite’ (a translated (betrayed) culture;
Simon 1994: 35), and that English in all its manifestation serves as the instrument of
betrayal […] In response to my [Mezei’s] enquiry as to why Lalonde permitted Jones
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38 Chapter 2
to translate her poem, Jones explained that he presumed she allowed him to translate
it […] because she probably felt the point she was making was worth broadcasting –
the irony of using English against the English quite capable of surviving translation.
Mezei is not all that critical of the translation ef fort. Despite pointing out the
‘potent irony’ involved and, in addition, noting that D.G. Jones’s translation
may not be equivalent to the original Speak White in terms of its polemics,
Mezei (ibid. 241) celebrates Jones for ‘generating the desired complex and
uneasy response in his reader, and in producing a remarkable poem that con-
tinues to render the 1968 experience tangible for the contemporary reader’.
While attempts to translate literature with explicit language ideological
messages should be applauded, it is debatable whether the potent ‘irony of
using English against the English’ can actually survive translation. In this
regard, the case of Speak White is classic and illuminative: it demonstrates
how code-switching can serve as a literary device in textualising asymmetrical
power relations between languages and how translating such a text into the
language representing the cultural Other in the ST generates a paradox. In
subsequent sections of this chapter, I will illustrate a similar scenario with
examples from Singapore Chinese literature in English translation.
Translation research along this line has attempted to contextualise
the linguistic phenomenon of code-switching within the socio-ideological
background within which a particular ST is conceived. In this connec-
tion, Hatim and Mason (1997) provide a useful framework by adapting
Halliday’s (1978) theory of the social semiotics of language to translation
analysis. Central to their model of text analysis is the notion of ‘intertex-
tuality’, ‘a semiotic parameter exploited by text users, which draws on the
socio-cultural significance a given occurrence might carry’ (Hatim and
Mason 1997: 19). Thus, a given textual sign (for instance, a switch in codes
in discourse) may invoke a broader context, such as the tension between
Francophones and Anglophones in Québec in the case of Speak White.
This is possible insofar as the notion of ‘intentionality’ is activated. Hatim
and Mason (ibid.) explain that:
text users have intentions and, in order to indicate whether a text is of this or that
type, or whether a given text element invokes this or that socio-cultural concept, a
text producer will engage with another contextual criterion, known as intentionality.
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Taken out of context, a particular sequence of sounds, words or sentences is often

neutral as to its intertextual potential. Intended meaning materializes only when
pragmatic considerations are brought to bear on what the text producer does with
words and what it is hoped the text receiver accepts.
The authors cite the example of the word ‘Canute’, which in isolation
denotes an arrogant king who claims he could dictate the tides. The same
word, when used in the context of British politics to describe a party leader
– as in ‘Canute Kinnock’ – would yield a non-neutral value: it points to
the inability of the party leader in question. The concept of ‘value’, as fre-
quently employed by Hatim and Mason, is an important part of a social-
semiotic view of language. Textual elements such as sociolectal expressions
come to embody specific values through their interaction with the culture
in which a text is produced. Underlying this intertextuality is ‘motivated-
ness’, which ‘provides the essential link between textual occurrences and
the context in which they are embedded’ (ibid.: 24). The assumption,
therefore, is that instances of language use are motivated by ‘particular
ideational, interpersonal and textual orientations’ (ibid.) that can be elic-
ited through textual analysis.
But how would we know which textual occurrences are worthy of
inspection for their social-semiotic potential? It is here that the notion of
‘markedness’ and the static/dynamic continuum come into play. The latter
consists of a scale of values that ref lects the extent to which a piece of text
is marked. On one end of the continuum lie unmarked textual occurrences
that maximally fulfil reader expectations and confirm norms; textual activ-
ity is deemed ‘stable’ and instances of language use are hence considered
‘static’. On the other end of the scale lie marked textual occurrences that
defy reader expectations and f lout norms; this is where communication
becomes ‘turbulent’ and instances of language use are considered ‘dynamic’
(Hatim and Mason 1997: 23–4).
It is the dynamic use of language and the ensuing communicative tur-
bulence that present the greatest challenge to translators. Hatim and Mason
(1997) illustrate this by examining a typical example of marked language –
that of the idiolect – in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. In the play, the
utterances of the protagonist Eliza are initially characterised by tagging, as
in ‘I washed my face and hands afore I come, I did ’. Tagging is an idiolectal
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40 Chapter 2
structural feature associated with Cockney English, a dialect from London.

From the pragmatic-rhetorical perspective, the recurrent appearance of
tags portrays Eliza as an unconfident person ‘desperately seeking assurance
for almost every statement she makes’ (ibid.: 107). From the perspective
of discoursal meaning, the protagonist’s use of tagging expresses the ‘atti-
tudinal meaning’ of hesitancy, which can be interpreted as an ‘ideological
statement’ (ibid.: 108): it expresses a ‘sociolinguistic “stigma”’ (ibid.: 107)
that locates the protagonist’s weakness within the social hierarchy in which
she finds herself. The subsequent disappearance of tagging in Eliza’s speech
may then be read as being indexical of the transformation of the power
dynamic between Eliza and the other characters (ibid.: 104). Tagging can
thus be analysed as a ‘semiotic construct’ that generates meaning by interact-
ing with ‘the textual and extra-textual environment’ (ibid: 110). As Hatim
and Mason (ibid.: 106) correctly assert, ‘[u]tterances need to be seen as
signs in constant interaction with each other and governed by intertextual
conventions. Register membership and pragmatic purposes remain dormant
unless and until they are placed within a wider socio-cultural perspective,
involving sign systems as means of signification’.
Code-switching as sign:
Cases of Singapore Chinese literature in translation
Drawing on the social-semiotic perspective, as well as on other relevant

concepts mentioned in the brief review above, I propose that code-switching
be interpreted as a sign that derives its meaning through intertextuality.
Following Hatim and Mason (1997), two levels of functionally motivated
meaning are posited in each of these cases. The pragmatic-rhetorical mean-
ing of code-switching is obtained by juxtaposing the code-switched ele-
ments with other, unmarked elements in a text. The discourse-attitudinal
meaning is elicited by situating the act of code-switching within the lan-
guage relations evoked in the literary works in question. In the following
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I will examine two Chinese short stories and a play text from Singapore,
focusing in each case on the socio-semiotic meaning of code-switching and
its treatment in English translation.
Xiangchou/Homesickness
Aw Guat Poh’s short story Xiangchou and its English translation Homesickness
are collected in the bilingual anthology KIV (St André 2002: 72–6). The
story describes the nostalgic moment of an old man as he returns to his
homeland in China. The old man’s son and grandson accompany him on
this emotional trip, during which he is constantly f looded with memories of
his childhood days. In the story, a generational-cultural gap exists between
the old man and his grandson, demonstrated first and foremost by their
linguistic incompatibility. As the story commences, the old man arrives at
a temple which he last visited sixty years back, and faces two consecutive
questions from his grandson and son respectively.
Source Text
再见南普陀山，悠悠六十年。
他跪在菩萨面前，低下头,合着掌，一如当年。
再也无法一如当年了，当年是从叔叔的大手挣脱出来，从山下的小泥
路，一口气奔跳而来的。今天，抬头一望这新修好的石阶，山怎么这
么高，石阶怎么这么陡?
阿公，is that the temple you saw?
爸，那就是你在船上看见的山上的那座庙吗?
Translated Text
Sixty years had passed before he saw South Pu-tuo Mountain again.
Just like in the old days, he knelt before the Buddha, bowed his head and put his
palms together.
However, unlike in those days, when he twisted loose from his Uncle’s huge hand and
ran from the foot of the mountain all the way up along the small muddy path, the
mountain now appeared to be very high and the newly repaired stone steps seemed
very steep as he looked up.
‘Grandpa, is that the temple you saw?’
‘Dad, is that temple on the mountain the one you saw on board the ship?’
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42 Chapter 2
The code-switching performed by the grandson in the penultimate line

of the ST is rhetorically significant. The grandson manages to address his
grandfather in Chinese, but switches into English in his next utterance.
This switch in codes indicates that he is unable to deliver an utterance fully
in Chinese and needs to rely on linguistic resources from his English reper-
toire to fill the gap. The following utterance by the old man’s son is largely
reiterative of the preceding English utterance by the grandson. Here the
old man’s son is serving as a translator-mediator by repeating in a language
understood by the old man what the grandson has just said. This act of
mediation is therefore an instance of how translation ‘inhabits the space
of the language’ (Simon 1992: 174) within the ST. The translation that is
taking place here points to a potential communication failure between the
grandson and his grandfather which the son tries to repair. This instance
of intra-textual translation, which entails the juxtaposition of an English
utterance with its Chinese equivalent, highlights the markedness of the
grandson’s linguistic performance. This sequence of code-switching and
translation (with the latter ef fectively performing a ‘reverse code-switching’)
thus generates linguistic contrast and textual turbulence.
Towards the end of the story, the old man dwells on memories from his
old days as he eats a bowl of pig trotters’ vermicelli (a traditional Chinese
food), to which his grandson objects. As before, the grandson speaks in
a hybrid of Chinese and English as illustrated in the first and third utter-
ances below:
Source Text
阿公，What are you eating? Yak! 油油的，可能是high cholesterol的!
你懂什么? 阿公吃的是乡愁……
乡愁？Dad, what is 乡愁？
Translated Text
‘Grandpa, what are you eating? Yak! It’s so oily, could have high cholesterol!’
‘What do you know? Grandpa is eating his homesickness …’
‘Homesickness? Dad, what is homesickness?’
What is xiangchou or homesickness to a Chinese person? This is a theme

that the story attempts to explore, and the reader eventually finds that
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there is no single answer. To the old man, it is China (both as a concrete

geographic location viz. Mainland China and as a more abstract cultural
imaginary), where his cultural identity remains rooted. The grandson,
on the other hand, has a very dif ferent conception of what ‘home’ is. The
story ends with a poignant scene in which the grandson eats his favourite
McDonald’s hamburger and exclaims, ‘Grandpa, I know what is homesick-
ness already! I’m eating my homesickness now!’ This could well be naïve
talk by a child, but the implications of what the grandson says are much
more serious. Where is ‘homeland’ to a Chinese boy born in modern-day
Singapore, a globalised city-state where the English language and cultural
inf luences from the West are dominant? To someone like the grandson in
this story, what does Chinese language and culture – embodied, among
other things, in the pig trotters’ vermicelli – mean to him or her?
With these questions in mind, let us return to the linguistic operations
of the text. In Hatim and Mason’s (1997) terms, the grandson’s utterances
are instances of dynamic language (thereby generating communicative tur-
bulence) in the ST: they are set apart from all the other utterances by virtue
of the markedness of English in a Chinese textual environment. But the
marked status of English is not merely a textual issue; in the story, English
also represents the tongue of the cultural Other, an identity embodied by
the grandson. Code-switching thus plays more than a mimetic function
in the text; it is also indicative of a socio-ideological conf lict between
generations, viz. the old man and his grandson. We have, on the one hand,
the grandson who is repelled by the eating of pig trotters’ vermicelli and
instead indulges in McDonald’s hamburger and coke – both stereotypical
symbols of Western food culture. On the other hand, there is the grand-
father figure who cherishes his language (he speaks Chinese throughout),
cultural memories (for example, in the form of a characteristically Chinese
food) and traditional values (he prays to the Buddha in the beginning of
the story). The cultural dif ferences between the old man and his grand-
son are textualised in the form of bilingualism, which in turn is achieved
through the rhetorical strategy of code-switching.
The final sentence uttered by the grandson in the above extract is
especially illuminating in this regard. In the original text, the question
asked by the grandson embeds the key term xiangchou (‘homesickness’)
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44 Chapter 2
– Xiangchou, Dad, what is xiangchou? The notion of xiang (‘hometown’)

that has preoccupied the old man – and it is significant that this xiang is
located in China – is not the xiang to which the grandson belongs and
with which he identifies. There is also a linguistic dimension to this: the
grandson may not have understood the word xiangchou in the first place;
and if he has, his understanding would probably be much more simplistic
than it should be. The grandson’s incapacity to understand a Chinese word
with strong cultural associations, coupled with the fact that his perceived
‘hometown’ is far removed from the Chinese hometown of his grandfather,
points to his alienation from Chinese language and culture.
In sum, in terms of its pragmatic-rhetorical meaning, code-switching
signals the linguistic alterity of the grandson’s utterances, and points
to his inability to fully communicate in the Chinese language. On the
other hand, the discourse-attitudinal meaning of code-switching lies in its
intertextuality with the tension between English-speaking and Chinese-
speaking communities as it is evoked in the story. In line with the the-
matic thrust of the story, the English segments embedded in the Chinese
text embody the value of the negative cultural Other. By fictionalising
bilingualism through code-switching, the author critiques the younger
generation of Chinese Singaporeans for abandoning their cultural roots,
together with their mother tongue, embracing instead the language and
values of the West.
What happens to these levels of meaning when this bilingual text is
translated into English? From the extracts above, one can see that the code-
switched segments have been homogenised in the translation: the English
utterances of the ST are retained in the English translation, marked out
with italic type to indicate that they are originally encoded in English. This
homogenisation of foreign codes recalls Berman’s (1985/2004: 287) postula-
tion that ‘the ef facement of the superimposition of languages’ is one of the
‘deforming tendencies’ observed in translation. As such, homogenisation
is not a translation strategy; rather, it is usually an inevitable tendency in
the translating of texts written in one dominant language, with a sprinkling
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of other languages.3 Homogenisation, first and foremost, erases textual

dif ference in the ST, thereby turning a marked, embedded code into an
unmarked one that constitutes the matrix language of the TT. Thus, while
the grandson’s utterances are supposed to sound obtrusive and therefore
generate dynamic turbulence in the Chinese ST, they are absorbed into
the textual environment of the English translation and rendered static.
It would be a banal trite to say that there are losses involved in this
kind of translation. As discussed earlier, the hybrid utterances produced
by the grandson are symptomatic of the grandson’s linguistic alienation
from Chinese and inclination towards English. Code-switching in the
ST is thus a semiotic construct that generates meaning in respect to the
tension between the linguistic and cultural identity of the grandson and
that of his grandfather, with the father acting as a kind of intermediary.
This pragmatic function is compromised in the translation, in which one
code is used throughout. Without a contrasting code in the TT, there is
no markedness and therefore no textual turbulence to signal the grandson’s
linguistic alterity. Witness the symbolic utterance by the grandson, cited
above – Homesickness, Dad, what is homesickness? As stated earlier, the
Chinese original Xiangchou, Dad, what is xiangchou? may be interpreted
as a question posed by a boy who cannot understand the meaning of the
word xiangchou because of his foreignness with respect to the Chinese
language. In the English translation, however, the same interpretation is
untenable. The English question, rather, must be read as one asked by a
boy who is too young to understand the complexities of nostalgic emotion.
By signalling linguistic alterity, code-switching is also indexical, in that
it points to the matrix code as the ‘preferred’ code and to the embedded code
as the foreign code, the code of the Other. If, following a social-semiotic
3 There are notable exceptions, of course. Berman, for example, celebrates the transla-
tor Maurice Betz, who has been able to preserve subtle linguistic dif ferences in the
dialogues between the characters Hans Castorp and Madame Chauchat in the French
translation of Thomas Mann’s heterolingual novel The Magic Mountain. He claims
that the successful translation of heterolingualism, as exemplified in Betz’s work, is
‘not quite impossible, certainly dif ficult – to which every translator of a novel ought
to aspire’ (Berman 1985/2004: 288).
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46 Chapter 2
reading of the original text, the Chinese code represents the ‘We-language’,
and the English code the ‘They-language’, these indexical functions become
problematic in translation. In the Chinese text, English performs concur-
rently as the foreign embedded language and the language of Other. Here
the ‘weaker’ textual status of English as an embedded code (vis-à-vis the
dominant code) corresponds to its indexical position as the dispreferred
‘They-language’. In the English translation, however, the situation becomes
tricky. English is now the new matrix language; it is the language of narra-
tion, and the code in which all utterances, including those of the old man,
are delivered. However, since the translated text retains the plot, characters
and setting of the original story, the English code still points to the iden-
tity of the cultural Other (on the level of the story), at the same time as
it assumes dominant textual status in the translation (on the level of the
discourse). The translated text is essentially an English-language story that
laments the marginality of Chinese language and culture, critiquing the
undesirable inf luence of the English language and its associated culture on
the younger generation of Chinese Singaporeans. Consequently, we have
what I call the paradox of the code, whereby English is used to express the
alterity of English in translation.
Michael ‘Yang’
The next story we will look at is Michael ‘Yang’ by Wong Meng Voon (St
André 2001: 142–5). This is a poignant tale about a ‘Westernised’ Chinese
man who is so alienated from the Chinese language – which, in the context
of Singapore, would be his default mother tongue – that he has even for-
gotten how to write his family name, Yang. The main character, Yang Mai-
ke, attends a Chinese-speaking event – the launch of a Chinese monthly
magazine – and gives a speech in Mandarin ‘prepared by his secretary
which had Hanyu Pinyin written above the characters’ (note how the use
of pinyin romanisation is once again symptomatic of a lack of proficiency
in the Chinese language), and which he ‘practised ‘reading diligently’ a few
times before the event’. After having successfully delivered the Mandarin
speech, he is panic-stricken when asked to sign his name in Chinese. With
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much struggle, he manages to pen his name in Chinese characters eventu-

ally and is much relieved after having done so. The bitter twist in the story
is that Yang Mai-ke has unknowingly written his surname wrongly: the
radical in the character representing his surname (the ‘wood’ radical) has
been wrongly substituted by another radical (the ‘rice’ radical), thereby
producing a misconstructed character: .
In the original Chinese text, three layers of tension are set up around
the name of our main character, each compromised in the English transla-
tion. First, the English name Michael Yang is juxtaposed with the Chinese
name Yang Mai-ke. Here the English name occurs as a foreign intrusion in
the Chinese text. It is an instance of code-switching imbued with discourse-
attitudinal meaning: it foregrounds the anglophone identity of the central
character in the story as well as the tension between this cultural identity
and his ethnic identity. The textual contrast between the two language-
versions of the same name in the same text evokes the dual identity of the
main character (as perceived by the author). This contrast does not hold in
the English translation, where the Chinese name Yang Mai-ke is rendered
as ‘Michael’. Consequently, there can be no possibility of maintaining
the linguistic tension between the forms ‘Michael’ and ‘Michael Yang’
(the latter appears in English in the Chinese text and is reproduced in the
translated text), except by way of italicisation. This may be illustrated by
the segment below:
Source Text
杨迈克心头一懔。他只学过“讲华语”，哪儿料到要“写华文”呢? [......]
正想不管它三七二十一，照例签上Michael Yang 算了......
Translated Text
A feeling of panic seized Michael. He had only learnt how to ‘speak Mandarin’; how
was he to know that he also had to ‘write Chinese’? […] At first he thought of throw-
ing caution to the winds and signing Michael Yang as usual …4
4 I believe there is a mistranslation here: ‘throwing caution to the winds’, which means
‘taking a risk’, is inappropriate in this context, as Michael’s writing of his English name
would not entail a risk at all; rather it would be a safe route out of his predicament.
The idiom used in the Chinese original buguansanqiershiyi literally means ‘regardless
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48 Chapter 2
The second layer of tension lies between the main character’s Chinese
name and the typical form of a Chinese name. To better understand this,
let us take a brief look at the morphemic structure of Chinese names. A
typical Chinese name has either one or two first names, each represent-
ing a single morpheme with a phonetic and semantic value of its own, by
virtue of the morphosyllabic nature of Chinese writing. In this respect,
the first names Mai-ke are atypical as they do not represent two separate
morphemes, even though they are written in two discrete Chinese charac-
ters; they are rather a syllabic transliteration of the English name ‘Michael’,
thus forming a single bi-syllabic morpheme. If one’s self-identity is, first
and foremost, rooted in one’s name – and this idea is deeply embedded in
traditional Chinese thinking – the anglicised form of Michael’s Chinese
name is symbolic of the loss of his Chinese identity. With this knowledge
in mind, we can see how tension is generated between the main character’s
name, which is a transliteration of an extremely common English name, and
the formal qualities of a typical Chinese name, whereby each of the first
names carries its own semantics. In the translation, such tension cannot be
retained. In the segment cited above, the rendering of the Chinese name
Yang Mai-ke in the first line as Michael is a kind of back-translation that
neutralises the transliterative nature of the Chinese name in the ST and
thus its symbolic significance.
The third layer of tension occurs at the very end of the story. It lies in
the contrast between the correct form of the surname Yang and its mis-
constructed form.
Source Text
他只好硬着头皮，集聚全身功力于右手，把他平生所学过的三个汉字，
拿笔像他祖父拿锄头一般，一笔一划地写了出来: 迈克。
Translated Text
Gathering all his know-how into his right hand, and holding the pen like his grandfa-
ther would clutch a pickaxe, stroke by stroke, he wrote down the only three Chinese
characters he had learnt in his entire life: 迈克.
of the circumstances’. The sentence should thus be rendered as ‘At first he wanted to
just go ahead and sign his name as Michael Yang’.
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In this scene, the graph finally written by Michael to represent his surname
(with the ‘rice’ radical) does not exist in the language; a Chinese reader
would know this at sight and immediately appreciate the satirical stance of
the author. The graph produced by Michael stands intra-textually in con-
trast with the correct form of the graph (with the ‘wood’ radical) as used
in the rest of the narrative. This intra-textuality is crucial for the miscon-
structed graph to achieve its intended ef fect. One could also say that this
ef fect is derived from an intertextual relation with the reader’s knowledge
of the correct form of the graph. In either case, the reading adopted here
is semiotic, as it relates the sign in question (i.e. the misconstructed graph)
with other signs that af ford it with meaning.
In the translation, the misconstructed graph, together with Michael’s
first names in Chinese, is retained, thus generating a code-switch in the
English text (see excerpt cited above). This retention creates a problem,
as the correct form of the Chinese character does not appear anywhere
in the TT (recall that instances of Yang Mai-ke in the ST are rendered
simply as Michael in translation). In the absence of intra-textual contrast,
the misconstructed graph stands in isolation. Here we have a problem of
untranslatability, where the ST engages playfully with the composition of
a logographic script, which cannot possibly be domesticated by an alpha-
betic system without compromising the ST. The translator thus resorts
to a footnote, explaining that Michael has written his Chinese surname
wrongly. The use of an explanatory note, while justifiable as a paratextual
strategy to mitigate the problem of untranslatability, also points to the
textual predicament in which the translation finds itself.
It is also worth noting that in the ST, the order of the first names
and surname/last name of Michael as used throughout the text (i.e. Yang-
surname + Mai-ke-first names, which is the conventional order in which
names appear in Chinese) is reversed in the final scene to conform to
the formal convention of English names (i.e. Mai-ke-first names + Yang-
surname). This is deliberate word-play by the author to critique Michael’s
anglophone identity – the ordering of Michael’s Chinese name in accord-
ance with the convention of English names is symptomatic of his ‘miscon-
structed’ cultural identity. The translation strangely reverses the sequence,
moving the surname back to the first position, in line with Chinese naming
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50 Chapter 2
conventions. Consequently, there is a certain irony, in the context of the

English translation, that Michael should have written his surname wrongly,
while getting the order of his name ‘right’.
The code-switch between Michael’s Chinese and English names in the
original text, though minimal, is central to the articulation of the story’s
theme. As discussed above, the switches and contrasts present in the ST
are largely absent in its translation. Where bilingual ‘moments’ occur in the
ST (as in when Michael’s English name appears), they are f lattened into a
homogenised English translation; conversely, at the end of the story, where
the misconstructed graph appears without generating a code-switch in the
ST, the TT introduces a bilingual turn. Consequently, the graph sticks out
like a sore thumb in the English TT, and there is not much the translator
could have done to prevent this. But this becomes more than a technical
issue if we consider the relative indexical values of the two codes in ques-
tion. In the ST, the misconstructed graph is a central sign of the text that
bears the imprint of a negative Other, in contradistinction to its correctly
formed counterpart and with the entire Chinese text in general (Chinese
being the default ‘We’-language to Chinese readers). The presence of the
graph – it is a corruption, as it were, an aberration of the written language –
is symptomatic of Michael’s total estrangement from Chinese. As explained
in a footnote by the translator, the choice of the ‘rice’ radical in this graph
is deliberate – it resembles the Union Jack, signifying ‘Michael’s obsession
with things British/English and his contempt for all things Chinese’.
I would argue that the translator’s use of this footnote, which does
not exist in the ST, indicates the impasse of the central sign of the text.
The misconstructed graph in the English translation does not point to
itself as Other; after all there is no ef fective contrast between it and the
English name ‘Michael’. In order for this sign to work in translation, the
English reader must either be able to identify the wrong radical used in
the graph, or otherwise rely on the explanatory footnote. And the very
existence of the footnote points to the possibility that the English reader
does not know that what s/he is seeing is a malformed Chinese character.
Thus, the sudden intrusion of a quasi-Chinese graph into an English text,
together with the footnote, is a stark reminder that the graph is operating
in the verbal territory of the cultural Other. It exacerbates the foreignness
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of the text in which it is embedded by virtue of its being a code-switch.

The deitics of the graph thus reverses in the course of translation. This
potentially creates a paradox in the latter, whereby an aberrant Chinese
graph that signals foreignness also foregrounds the Otherness of the lan-
guage in which the translation is inscribed, which, to the English reader,
stands as the ‘We’-language.
Shizhong yinzhe/Invisibility
The last case presented here is a Chinese play text titled Shizhong yinzhe by
the Singaporean author and scholar Quah Sy Ren, and its English transla-
tion, Invisibility (Quah 2000). The play tells the story of ‘A’, a disenchanted
Singaporean man who seeks to acquire the ancient Chinese art of invis-
ibility as a means of escape from the oppressive society in which he lives.
‘A’ is well-versed in Chinese history and classics. This is evidenced in his
monologue on the socio-political situation during the Wei-Jin Dynasty
of China and the reclusive tendencies of the Chinese literati during that
period (ibid.: 15, 17), as well as his citation from an ancient Chinese book
Baopuzi on the rituals for becoming invisible (ibid.: 45).
The back-cover of the published text (Quah 2000; my emphasis) tells
us brief ly what the play is about:
Invisibility is a poignant tale about alienation and the search for meaning in modern
urban society – scenes of various people on the margins of society seeking to connect
with others are [in] juxtaposition with the tale of a man searching for the secret to
make himself invisible. Drawing from diverse sources of Chinese literary classics and
graf fiti as modern social commentary, and moving from the private space of the lava-
tory to the public park, this critically-acclaimed play […] takes you on a voyeuristic
ride towards urban myth.
As with all literary texts, the play is open to interpretation, be it social or

philosophical. While not excluding other interpretations, I follow the line
of reading that sees this play as a commentary on the ‘alienation’ of sino-
phone Chinese Singaporeans, who belong, at the sociolinguistic level, to
the category of ‘various people on the margins of society’. This reading is
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52 Chapter 2
derived from the language ideological context in which the text is embed-
ded and has previously been adopted by St André (2006b: 148–51) in his
study of the play.
In the play, the anti-hero ‘A’ attempts to find his way out of contem-
porary Singapore by pursuing the unorthodox, quasi-religious art of invis-
ibility. The playwright makes reference to a particular period in Chinese
history, during which hermitism was adopted by the literati as a response
to bad government:
Source Text
魏晋南北朝……许多人受不了社会的光怪陆离，他们不想同流合污，又
不知道该怎么做，都纷纷离开人世，住到没有人的深山里过着隐居的
生活，有的人开始沉迷于仙术。
Translated Text
The Wei Jin Dynasties. Many people didn’t like the society they were living in, and
they didn’t want to be part of it, but they didn’t know what they could do about it,
and so, one by one, they left for the hills and mountains to lead a hermit’s life. Some
of them started practising the spiritual arts. (Quah 2000: 16–17)
The historical reference here points to the motivation behind ‘A’s’ learning
of the art of invisibility. Accordingly, people living in contemporary urban
society want to become invisible because of their dissatisfaction with the
society, which makes them want to alienate themselves from it by means
of ‘disappearing’ into the thin air. This social-psychological state is likened
to that of the literati in ancient China who adopted a hermitic way of life
to distance themselves from the society they did not like and therefore did
not want to be part of.
If we take this reading a step further, it is possible to produce an anglo-
phobic interpretation that coheres with the language power relations in
Singapore. Under the inf luence of philosophical Daoism, the tendency
towards hermitism and reclusion formed a sub-culture within the culture
of the traditional Chinese literati, strongly associated with the disillusion-
ment of the educated elite with the mundane of ficial world. Specifically,
hermitism was practised by frustrated men of letters who were politically
marginalised as they could not live with the degradation and injustices
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that prevailed in the of ficial-bureaucratic world. The motif of invisibility

in the Chinese play is thus metonymic of a larger socio-psychological phe-
nomenon in Chinese cultural history that evokes the condition of mar-
ginalisation. Read in this light, the play may be interpreted as a ‘modern
social commentary’ on the ‘alienation’ and frustration of the sinophone
Chinese community in Singapore, who are ‘on the margins of society
seeking to connect with others’ (Quah 2000, back cover). Read against
the sociolinguistics of Singapore, the desire to become invisible can thus
be interpreted as the response of a Chinese-speaking Singaporean to the
hegemony of English language and culture. This is the interpretation
adopted by St André (2006b: 148), who begins his analysis of the play
with the following lines: ‘Faced with the growing power of English, what
can a Mandarin-speaking Singaporean do? In Quah Sy Ren’s ‘Invisibility’,
we watch a well-educated Mandarin speaker answer this question by trying
to disappear’.
If we read Shizhong yinzhe as an allegory of the cultural marginalisation
of the Chinese-speaking community in Singapore and the latter’s answer to
their cultural condition, what then becomes of the play in its English trans-
lation, Invisibility? Let us first consider the hybridity of the discourse that
constitutes the original play and its implications for translating the text into
English. The Chinese play text is characterised by frequent code-switching
into English and a hybridised register realised through the insertion of
colloquial and/or dialectal expressions into otherwise standard Chinese
constructions. The following excerpt illustrates this linguistic feature:
Source Text
乙: Excuse me, 你以为你是 Christmas tree 吗? Christmas tree 也有 style 的 OK?
即使是白色的 Christmas tree 也不是一個白痴!
A: 喂，你做人身攻击!
乙: Sue me lah! 去 High Court sue me lah!
Translated Text
B: Excuse me, you think you Christmas tree isit [sic]? Even Christmas tree have
style, okay!
A: That’s a personal attack.
B: Sue me lah! Go High Court sue me lah!
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54 Chapter 2
Here the Chinese ST features two languages and is written in an extremely

vernacular style; the English translation, on the other hand, is basically
monolingual, while reproducing the distinctively colloquial register, thus
culminating in ‘Singlish’ (a contraction of ‘Singapore English’, in ef fect,
Singapore Colloquial English). In other words, while the ST is both het-
erolingual and heteroglossic, the translated text is equally heteroglossic
though relatively monolingual (St André 2006b: 149). What then do we
make of the stylistic dif ferences between the Chinese and English versions?
The two versions seem to match each other very well in terms of register,
with Singapore Colloquial Chinese and Singapore Colloquial English both
being vernacular linguistic varieties. Given that Invisibility, together with
its ST, is published locally (at least initially), its target readers are probably
English-speaking Singaporeans. This makes the choice of Singlish in the
translated play quite appropriate, as it does convey the colloquial f lavour
of the Chinese play.5 But as St André (2006b: 150–1) points out, whereas
the Chinese ST maintains its structural integrity despite being subject to
extensive code-switching, the English translation is permeated with so
much Singlish as to be grammatically compromised:
[T]he maintenance of proper grammar in Mandarin suggests a certain assurance

in A’s identity as a Chinese speaker. He and other characters may mix in individual
words, even whole sentences, from other languages. But these never threaten the
basic structure of the language in the way that Singlish subverts English to the point
almost of unintelligibility for outsiders. Taken together as two sides of the same coin,
the two scripts suggest two lines of thought. First, that actually it is English which
is more in danger of becoming ‘invisible’ in Singapore, not Mandarin. Second, that
the Chinese-speaking Singaporean is more ‘grounded’ in Chinese culture than his
English-speaking counterpart is in English culture.
While the above argument is generally cogent, an alternative view is pos-

sible. To take a social-semiotic point of view, English code-switching in
5 For the non-Singaporean reader without access to the Chinese play, the Singlish-
laden translation would prove a challenge to comprehension, and therefore sound
foreignised. This ef fect of foreignisation can indeed be seen as an unexpected gain
in translation.
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a Chinese text is evocative of the language ideological tension between

English and Chinese not just within the theatrical discourse of the play
but also within the sociolinguistic context of multilingual Singapore, thus
playing important rhetorical and discourse roles. Specifically, following
Bakhtin’s (1981: 263) conceptualisation of linguistic stratification as a pro-
liferation of social voices, it may be posited that the intrusion of English
utterances into a primarily Chinese discourse is symbolic of the infiltra-
tion of ‘Western’ linguistic and cultural inf luences into the ethnic Chinese
community in contemporary Singapore. The fact that Chinese still main-
tains its presence as the matrix language of the ST as well as its structural
integrity amid code-switching may be read as its resistance to English
hegemony. Code-switching is thus metonymic not only of the linguistic
hybridity that can be observed on a daily basis in conversations among
Chinese Singaporeans, but also of the socio-cultural tension between the
anglophone and sinophone sub-communities within the Chinese popula-
tion. The play text in ef fect becomes a meta-text that manifests the motif
of loss (of Chinese language and cultural identity in Singapore) through
the textual fabric of its own composition.
If Chinese-to-English code-switching in Shizhong yinzhe evokes the
tension between the two languages in Singapore society, what are the
ramifications of translating the play into English, where the target language
in question happens to be the foreign embedded language in the ST? As
with the earlier examples, the central problem here is that the embedded
language is associated with the identity of the cultural Other (from the
vantage point of the ST), as opposed to the identity of Self as represented
by the matrix language. Previous studies of similar phenomena in other
cultures provide some interesting insights. In addition to Mezei’s (1998)
analysis of the English translation of a French poem with an anglophobic
theme (discussed in this chapter, ‘The social semiotics of code-swtiching in
translation’), Meylaerts (2007) reports on how French translators manipu-
late code-switched passages in bilingual Flemish novels. This was done
partly through the erasure of Flemish dialects, with the aim of reinforcing
the high social status represented by French.
The parallel texts Shizhong yinzhe and Invisibility present a case that
falls in line with these observations. The homogenisation of the mixed
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56 Chapter 2
codes in the Chinese play through translation signals a mitigation of the
language ideological tension between Chinese and English in Singapore
society as evoked by code-switching. This language ideological tension
constitutes a social-semiotic interpretation of the original text. In the
translated play, this interpretation is less likely to arise due to the relative
monolinguality of the TT. This means that in terms of its interpretive
potential, the translated play departs from its ST and obtains a life of
its own. On the one hand, the original Chinese play may be interpreted
both as (1) a social commentary on how a young Singaporean man fan-
tasises about becoming invisible to seek refuge from the urban society
with which he is strongly dissatisfied; and (2) an allegorical text on how
a young Singaporean man who is strongly af filiated to Chinese language
and culture fantasises about becoming invisible to seek refuge from the
hegemony of an English-speaking society. On the other hand, only the first
interpretation sits comfortably with the English translation of the play.
The second interpretation, which carries an anglophobic theme, would
render the text somewhat ironic when applied to the translated play, in
the sense that we will then be looking at an English-speaking protago-
nist who is, at the same time, assuming the marginalised position of the
Chinese cultural man. This does not mean, of course, that the translated
text is compromised as a play in its own right; rather, it is a work that has
to be interpreted on its own terms.
From the perspective of comparing source and target texts then, trans-
lation alters the textuality of the ST and, on a thematic level, downplays
the subversive potential of the foreign language in the ST (Grutman 2009:
185). An anglophobic reading of the Chinese play, which is derived from
the tension between English and Chinese within the sociolinguistics of
Singapore and textually manifested through code-switching, is likely to be
displaced or ‘unread’ in a Chinese-to-English translation. This, however,
need not be construed as a loss in translation; rather, it is an inevitable
consequence of translation that it brings identity issues to bear on cross-
lingual practice. The case of Shizhong yinzhe/Invisibility demonstrates
that a bilingual text can become a site of interpretive f lux, whereby the
two languages in question do not function merely as linguistic codes per
se, but as emblems of social voices that interact with the sociolinguistic
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reality in which the entire text is embedded in the generation of meaning.

The translation of a bilingual text is thus not merely a demanding linguistic
excursion in handling the textual relation between two language codes;
it necessarily implicates language ideological factors that may impinge on
the negotiation of the interpretive dimensions of the text.
Asymmetry in translating heterolingualism:

A case of self-translation
The preceding examples show that the homogenisation of mixed codes in

a bilingual text through translation is symptomatic of a textual violence
that translation enacts, with implications for the identity functions of the
source and target texts. Just as translating a text that employs a sociolect
may result in a TT with increased cohesion and a reduction in interper-
sonal elements, thus attenuating the identity constructed by the sociolect
in question (Munday 2012: 158), so the homogenisation of mixed codes
in a bilingual text in translation will compromise the identity function
performed by code-switching in the ST.
What then should we make of the case where bilingualism is intro-
duced in translation? Indeed, the decision to homogenise or ‘bilingualise’
a text in translation is often a function of the relative prestige of the two
languages in question. As Grutman (2006: 25–6) astutely observes:
The most fundamental dif ference to keep in mind, then, when studying literary
translation as a socio-cultural rather than a purely linguistic phenomenon, would
be the line separating transfers between, on the one hand, literatures that are poten-
tially equal or at the very least comparable, and, on the other hand, clearly unequal
partners. In the latter case, everything depends of course on the direction of the
transfer: whether it is dominant literatures that sort of ‘upgrade’ texts by unsung
foreign heroes or rather dominated literatures that select and ‘download’ classics,
as it were, from the catalogue of world literature […] The choice to either delete
or maintain the original’s multilingualism will depend not only on the translator’s
personal ethics (as advocated by Berman), but also on the (in)dependent status and
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58 Chapter 2
prestige of the source literature in respect to those of the target literature, as well as
on collective attitudes towards the languages one is translating from, each having
their perceived socio-cultural importance and relative weight on the world market
of linguistic goods.
Drawing on Casanova’s (1999/2004) theory of the ‘world republic of letters’,

Grutman is concerned with the exchange of literatures through transla-
tion on a global scale. However, it is also relevant to the more ‘local’ case
of translation within Singapore, in the sense that English and Chinese are
asymmetric in terms of their social capital and therefore constitute what
Grutman (ibid.) refers to as ‘unequal partners’. Grutman’s argument that
the treatment of mixed codes in bilingual transfer is contingent upon the
socio-cultural importance that one language possesses vis-à-vis the other
provides us with a neat conceptual framework within which we might
explain the unbalanced tendencies in translating bilingual texts in dif ferent
directions. In this connection, I explore two plays by acclaimed Singaporean
playwright Kuo Pao Kun (1939–2002), a highly acclaimed Singaporean
playwright who, after 1985, wrote his plays in either Chinese or English
and translated them into the other language himself (Quah 2006: 89).
The case of Kuo’s self-translation is particularly illuminating as the
languages in question are in ideological conf lict (see Chapter 1). Of theo-
retical relevance is Hokenson and Munson’s (2007: 4) seminal study on
self-translation, which departs from equivalence paradigms with a focus
on ‘author as interculture and textual bilinguality as interliminality’. On
the assumption that ‘the interliminal space between linguistic versions
need not be foreclosed by dif ference but may be opened by it’ (ibid.: 11),
Hokenson and Munson exploit the ‘prime space of reading’ (ibid.: 8) cre-
ated by the translational space between a literary work and its translation
by the very author who wrote the original text. Located along this line of
research, Kuo’s bilingual oeuvre presents us with a fruitful site from where
we can observe how a bilingual Chinese Singaporean playwright mediates
the translational space not only between two languages but also between
two cultural identities. By conceptualising the two language versions of
the same play as a liminal space within which the playwright articulates
complex identity discourses marked by English and Chinese, I seek to
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examine the dif ferent modalities arising from Kuo’s bilingual enterprise.

More specifically, my interest is in how the direction of translation inter-
acts with code-switching phenomena to generate identity meanings. The
two play texts examined here are: Lao Jiu (Guo 1995: 223–80), first written
in Chinese and then translated into English as Lao Jiu – The Ninth Born
(Kuo 2000: 248–305), and No Parking on Odd Days (Kuo 2000: 76–97),
first written in English and subsequently translated into Chinese as Danri
buke tingche (Guo 1995: 27–45). In both cases, Kuo Pao Kun doubles as
the playwright and translator.
Lao Jiu is a Chinese play about a Singaporean boy named Lao Jiu,
who faces a conf lictual choice between accepting a prestigious scholarship
of fer that would propel him towards an eminent career and his desire to
continue the lineage of the dwindling art of Chinese traditional puppetry.
In terms of its linguistic constitution, Lao Jiu resembles Shizhong yinzhe
(discussed in Chapter 2, ‘Shizhong yinzhe/Invisibility’) in that it employs
two language codes that embody dif ferent identity functions in the play.
Whereas Chinese is the primary language espousing Chinese cultural
identity, as exemplified by traditional Chinese puppetry, English is the
embedded language which appears in several study scenes in the form
of academic expressions such as scientific and mathematical formulae.
Consider the passage below:
Source Text
父亲（场外）九仔。起来，读书咯！
母亲（场外）给他再睡一下啦。
父亲（场外）蓝田玉去考状元咯，读书，读书！
老九（老九振作起来，猛然遥遥头，吃点心，喝豆水，吞补品……）
Mathematics!（头部运动）Algebraic Relations and Topics, Functions, Coordinate
Geometry, Trigonometry, Integration, Dif ferentiation, Vectors, Series, Permutations
and Combinations, Probability, Distributions, Random Variables, Estimation ……
（开始“竞走”，臀部抖动得厉害）P(1) is true, P(n) is true, P(n+1) is true
[……]
The gradient of a curve at any given point is defined as the gradient of the tangent
to the curve at that point and measures the rate of increase of y with respect to x. a
越高，b 越低, x 越大，y越小，生育越多，分享越少（继续比划图表）男
人应该尽量深造，女人读书太高没人要。Pizza Hut 有了delivery service，
生意的curve就越升越高。
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60 Chapter 2
Translated Text
FATHER: (Of fstage) Gao Gia’ng, get up and study lah!
MOTHER: (Of fstage) Let him rest some more lah.
FATHER: (Of fstage) Lam Tian Geok going to the imperial capital already. Wake
up, study!
Lao Jiu re-alerts himself. Shakes his head, takes some snacks, drinks the soyabean
milk, swallows some vitamins.
LAO JIU: Mathematics.
Algebraic Relations and Topics, Functions, Coordinate Geometry, Trigonometry,
Integration, Dif ferentiation, Vectors, Series, Permutations and Combinations,
Probability, Distributions, Random Variables, Estimation ……
(He begins to jog fast, hips swinging.)
P(1) is true. P(n) is true. P(n+1) is true.
[……]
The gradient of a curve at any given point is defined as the gradient of the tangent
to the curve at that point and measures the rate of increase of y with respect to x.
a higher, b lower, x bigger, y smaller, the more you beget, the less you share. Boys
should study more. Girls should beget more.
Pizza Hut Delivery Service, the more you bake, the more you make, the motorcycle
more faster, the profit curve shoot higher.
The textual tension created through the juxtaposition of English and
Chinese in the play can be seen as a linguistic realisation of the ideological
tension that confronts the protagonist in his life choice. In the play, Lao Jiu
is torn between two constructed worlds (Ong 2000): he either conforms
to the material world of science, mathematics and scholarships represented
by the English language, or fulfils his dreams by remaining in the cultural
world of traditional puppetry represented by the Chinese language (which
is not exclusively Mandarin, judging from the use of dialects in the play). In
the sociolinguistic situation in Singapore, Lao Jiu’s dilemma is metonymic
of the conf lict between the pursuit of economic success (often discursively
linked to the English language) and the maintenance of traditional values
(for instance, through the promotion of mother tongue languages). The
TT corresponds to the ST in terms of its content and themes. However, its
textuality dif fers, as the tension between the linguistic codes is smoothed
out in the English translation. Again, this should not simply be seen as
a loss; as mentioned earlier, the homogenisation of mixed codes is quite
inevitable in the translation of bilingual texts. Here the focus is not on
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what is lost, but rather on the consequences of such homogenisation for

the identity function of the translated text.
According to Ong (2000: 307), who directed the stage version of Lao
Jiu, Kuo’s sympathy is for the ‘old world’ (represented by the puppeteer),
which is ‘treated nostalgically and fondly’ in the play. By extension then,
the ‘new world’ represented by science, mathematics and scholarships is
the realm of the cultural Other. By homogenising the mixed codes in the
original Lao Jiu, the English translation alters the identity function of the
play by downplaying the textual opposition between English and Chinese,
thereby reducing the anglophobic tension in the original play. Interestingly,
in another set of English–Chinese plays No Parking on Odd Days/Danri
buke tingche, we witness a reverse treatment of bilingualism. In this set
of parallel texts, English is the source language and Chinese is the target
language. Let us consider two passages from the play:
Source Text 1
Let me start with this parking of fence – that time I got a ticket when I left my car
at the end of the street when I went to visit this friend of mine in Bukit Timah. He
lives in a rented garage of one of those old, pre-war bungalows. When I came out,
there was this ticket waiting for me tucked under the windscreen, you know how
they do it. The ticket says I committed an of fence leaving my car too close to the
end of the street.
Translated Text 1
我先讲我去找朋友park车被“恶公”这一件事。很多年前了。我去Bukit
Timah探一个老朋友，车放在他门口给traf fic “book”。我的朋友住在一
间战前的bungalow后面的车房里。很久不见，我们聊了很长一段时间，
到我回去开车，糟糕，挡风玻璃前面放了一张summons，放在wiper下
面，你们知道怎样放啦，那summons讲我park车犯规，离开路口太近。
Source Text 2
When I arrived at the traf fic magistrate’s court, I found a long queue outside. I
showed the policeman there my summons and he told me to line up also. When the
line started to move at about 9 o’clock, it moved very fast. I had never been to court
so I thought to myself, ‘Wah, this is ef ficient, man. Not like the American courts we
see in the movies, our court is fast, man!’
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62 Chapter 2
Translated Text 2
当我一早到了专门交“恶公”的traf fic court, 也是长龙排到大街上。我把
summons给警察看，他叫我在后面排。九点多，队伍开始动，一动就动得
很快。我从来没有去过，觉得很新鲜，我心里想：“哗，效率很高man。
不像美国电影那种法庭辩到又长又臭，我们的法庭实在快！”
In the passages above, the code-switched elements in the TT (‘traf fic court’,

‘summons’, ‘bungalow’, ‘park’ etc.) have ready lexical equivalents in the
Chinese language, but the playwright chooses to employ the English forms
instead. In fact, English forms are at times added by Kuo to his Chinese
translation of the play without corresponding source language forms. In
the first set of texts cited above, for instance, the word ‘summons’, which
appears twice in the Chinese translation, corresponds to the word ‘ticket’
in the English ST; the word ‘traf fic’ and the second instance of the word
‘park’ in Translated Text 1 are additions by the playwright-translator. The
extracts above thus present a contrasting case with the treatment of bilin-
gualism in Lao Jiu. Whereas in Lao Jiu, the bilingual codes in the Chinese
text are homogenised in the English translation, in No Parking on Odd
Days, (relatively) monolingual English passages are turned into bilingual
Chinese passages through the insertion of English code-switches into the
Chinese text.
From the socio-semiotic perspective, the ascendance in the degree
of bilingualism as the play moves from English to Chinese may af fect the
thematic interpretation of the text. If code-switching is seen as an infil-
tration of English into the linguistic repertoire of sinophone Chinese
Singaporeans, the bilingualism that obtains in the Chinese play can be
read as a textual manifestation of the tension between the two identities or
‘voices’. To Quah (2004: 36), ‘the multilingual hybrid theatre’ of Singapore,
pioneered by Kuo Pao Kun, can be seen as ‘a subconscious response from
the Chinese-language theatre’ to the diminishing status of Chinese lan-
guage and culture in Singapore. Accordingly then, code-switching can be
seen as a textual device that constructs a conf lict in the identity discourse
espoused in the play. In the original English play text, the register used
is a mixture of non-standard ‘Singlish’ and Standard English, which sig-
nals a lack of power (represented by Standard English) on the part of the
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protagonist and the opposition between layman and authority (St André
2006b: 148). The Chinese translation, due to its English code-switching,
gains an added identity function by expressing the opposition not only
between layman and authority (a thematic line retained in the translation),
but also between a Chinese-speaking individual and an English-using bureau-
cracy. Since most of the code-switched elements in the translated play are
related to law and order, the presence of English segments in the Chinese
translation ‘reveals English as the language of power, law and order’ (ibid.)
and, by extension, the marginalised status of Chinese-speaking individuals
in an English-speaking society. Hence, in the case of the parallel texts No
Parking on Odd Days/Danri buke tingche, anglophobic tension is translated
into being through the bilingualisation of an English-language play into a
Chinese play with extensive English code-switching.
Juxtaposing the two sets of text discussed above – Lao Jiu and its
English translation as well as No Parking on Odd Days and its Chinese trans-
lation – an asymmetry is observable in Kuo Pao Kun’s treatment of bilin-
gualism in his Chinese-to-English and English-to-Chinese translations. As
argued in Lee (2009), the way in which code-switched elements are treated
in the translation of bilingual texts indicates the relative power of the two
languages in question. Specifically, if code-switching is symptomatic of the
penetration of one language (or ‘voice’) by another, the degree to which a
language lends itself to code-switching is determined by language power
(ibid.). The tendency for a Chinese translated text to contain extensive
code-switches into its source language points to the susceptibility of the
Chinese language to linguistic interference from this source language (in
this case, English). This ref lects a relative weakness in the symbolic power
of Chinese in contemporary Singapore society, and hence its inability to
resist penetration by an hegemonic language. In contrast, the fact that
an English translated text remains relatively monolingual is indicative
of its linguistic autonomy, suggesting that in multilingual Singapore, the
dominance of English is such that it can interfere with (or penetrate) other
languages but is rarely interfered with (or penetrated into). Using Toury’s
(1995) terms, we could perhaps say that the ‘law of growing standardisation’
is at work in Kuo’s Chinese-to-English translation, in the sense that the sty-
listic variation of the ST realised through code-switching is f lattened into
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64 Chapter 2
a relatively homogenised English discourse. On the other hand, the ‘law of

interference’ is in operation in English-to-Chinese translation, where code-
switching in the Chinese text betrays textual interference from English.
The consequence of such asymmetry is that while an anglophobic reading
may be attenuated in Chinese-to-English translation, as in the case of Lao
Jiu (and also Shizhong yinzhe), it can be amplified in English-to-Chinese
translation, as in the case of No Parking on Odd Days.
Since the two plays are written and translated by a single playwright,
one may ponder on the discourse of identity that is articulated between the
two directions of translation. Following Hokenson and Munson (2007), my
concern here is not so much the dif ference per se arising between the two
translation directions as the interliminal space opened up by such dif fer-
ence. This in-between space presents us with an optimal zone of reading in
which dif ferent identities interface under the pen of a single playwright/
translator. In other words, I am interested in the identity discourse ‘that
emerges from the traf fic between English and Chinese, the space that
conjoins and separates the two languages’ (Ho 2010: 60). Hokenson and
Munson (ibid.: 7) claim that bilingual writers – who may also be self-trans-
lators, as in the case of Kuo – often invoke the tension between discursive
communities within their texts. My analysis in this section supports this
claim by showing how Kuo’s works – both his original plays and his self-
translations – play out the tension between anglophone and sinophone
communities in Singapore. Indeed, Kuo’s most important contribution
has been his introduction of a multilingual theatre, which should not be
read as merely mirroring the linguistic reality in Singapore, but should
rather be seen as a material form through which multilingual identities in
Singapore are contested and negotiated (Quah 2006). The multilingual
mode of Chinese-language theatre (that is, theatre performed primarily
in Chinese, with code-switching into other languages such as English)
pioneered by Kuo provided a subversive discourse that contributed to an
alternative imagining of multilingual Singapore.6
6 See Quah (2004) for an account of the discursive relationship between multilingual
theatre in Singapore and of ficial narratives of multiculturalism.
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In enacting his plays in a bilingual mode via English-to-Chinese and

Chinese-to-English translation, Kuo establishes a symbiosis between the
two translation directions, thus delineating an interliminal site for the
negotiation of identities between the two poles of Chinese and English.
In his bilingual oeuvre, translation thus becomes a third space – to borrow
Bhabha’s (1994) much-quoted concept – within which the myth of
monolinguistic communities existing as singular entities alongside each
other, bonded only by the nexus of a lingua franca (English in the case of
Singapore), is challenged. Thus, within the context of the power relation
between English and Chinese in Singapore, the textual device of code-
switching gains a discursive significance: the mixing of languages in Kuo’s
theatre constitutes ‘a new form in imagining the multicultural’ (Quah
2004: 36). Hybridisation is the key motif that reveals itself from the bi-
directional f lows between English and Chinese. Through code-switching,
Kuo problematises the idea that cultural identities can be neatly demarcated
on the basis of language use.
I further contend that Kuo’s self-translation project adds a new dimen-
sion to this problematic. The asymmetrical relationship that obtains between
English-to-Chinese and Chinese-to-English self-translation demonstrates
that his imagining of multicultural Singapore cannot be simply subsumed
under the general rubric of hybridity. The strand of hybridity that emerges
from the symbiosis between the two translation directions entails unequal
exchanges that hinge upon the relative symbolic powers of Chinese and
English in contemporary Singapore society. Kuo’s self-translation practice,
together with its dif ferential treatment of bilingualism in the two trans-
lation directions, raises the following question: what kind of hybridised
identity do Chinese Singaporeans take on? Is it a predominantly Chinese
identity with anglophone inf luences, or a predominantly anglophone iden-
tity with Chinese inf luences? From the homogenisation of mixed codes
in Chinese-to-English translation and the escalation in bilingualism in
English-to-Chinese translation evident in the two plays discussed above,
Kuo seems to suggest that while there is no distinct correlation between
language use and cultural identity, the hybridity constructed in his bilin-
gual plays is not a simple one either. Rather, it is one that is tainted by the
ideological values pertaining to contemporary Singapore society, in which
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66 Chapter 2
English commands a much higher symbolic capital than Chinese, thus

rendering any exchange between the two languages unbalanced. Could we
imagine the protagonist in No Parking on Odd Days speaking Mandarin
throughout the Chinese version of the play without code-switching into
English, or the English incarnation of Lao Jiu code-switching into Mandarin
extensively in his English dialogue? That would be technically feasible, of
course, which all the more suggests that the asymmetry in bilingualism
constructed through Kuo’s works is symptomatic of language ideological
tension, and of the latent unequal exchanges involved in self-translation.
Conclusion
With its focus on code-switching and the implications for the translation
of Singapore Chinese literature, the discussion in this chapter participates
in current studies in fictional heterolingualism and translation (Delabastita
and Grutman 2005). As observed by Bandia (2008: 165), there has been a
growing interest in multilingual forms of expression in literature […] particularly

in such disciplines as postcolonialism and cultural studies which often deal with
the issues related to the clash or meeting of cultures or linguistic communities. The
tensions that may arise in these encounters often manifest themselves in language,
hence the importance of language contact situations for understanding the power
dif ferentials involved in postcolonial as well as other minority contexts.
The fictional works selected for close reading in the preceding sections are
bound by a common motif of loss that pertains to the marginalised position
of the Chinese language and the sinophone community in Singapore. As
I hope to have demonstrated, the ‘contact situation’ between anglophone
and sinophone Chinese Singaporeans portrayed in these works manifests
itself in the form of code-switching, which plays out ‘the clash or meeting
of cultures or linguistic communities’ and the ‘power dif ferentials’ between
the English and Chinese languages in multilingual Singapore. A social-
semiotic reading illustrates that the encounter between language codes in
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bilingual literary discourse is not a value-free phenomenon; rather, such

an encounter is metonymic of asymmetric language power relations and
indexical of the dif ferent cultural identities involved.
The implication for translation lies in how the treatment of the embed-
ded code in the original Chinese texts af fects the textual integrity of their
translations. There is a certain irony in turning the embedded code in the
ST into a primary code in the translated text, where ‘the linguistic ele-
ments that signalled Otherness in the original run the risk of having their
indexical meaning reversed and being read as “familiar” signs of Sameness’
(Grutman 2006: 22). Citing French and German translations of English
literature containing traces of the former two languages, Grutman (ibid.:
23) astutely observes that:
[w]hat was originally foreign and international has become eminently readable and
national. The opposite is equally true: quotes from English literature familiar to
Eliot’s British readers lose their immediacy in translation. Worse: left untranslated,
those same English lines stand out as a sore thumb, and turn what was meant to be
more or less ‘familiar’ into something utterly ‘foreign’.
Thus, if we are to obtain an anglophobic reading from the Chinese texts

(and such anglophobic tendencies are especially clear in the works col-
lected in the bilingual anthology Droplets), such a reading would become
paradoxical in translation. For if the same anglophobic interpretation were
to be sustained for the English translation, we would end up having the
English code deployed against itself. In other words, in turning a foreign
code that signals cultural markedness into an unmarked code that evokes
a more or less familiar anglophone identity, the act of translation produces
a crisis of representation, whereby the English language is being used to
enact a literary discourse that critiques the cultural identity it embod-
ies. This reminds us of the irony of translating the politically charged,
anti-anglophone French poem Speak White into English (Mezei 1998, see
this chapter, ‘The social semiotics of code-switching in translation’). In
some cases, as with Invisibility, the translation of Shizhong yinzhe, it might
be possible to circumvent this paradox, but only by way of adopting a
dif ferent reading of the TT – one that would compromise the anglophobic
thematics of the ST.
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68 Chapter 2
Nowhere is the power play between languages in translation more

clearly illustrated than in the case of Kuo Pao Kun’s bi-directional self-trans-
lation. As we have observed, the higher degree of bilingualism exhibited
in Kuo’s Chinese translation points to a higher propensity of the language
to be infiltrated by English. Here Chinese-to-English and English-to-
Chinese translation create an asymmetric interliminal space within which
an anglophobic theme may be ‘unread’ and ‘read’ into being respectively, and
within which a hybrid identity discourse is negotiated. By conceptualising
code-switching as an encounter of language codes in ideological tension,
the cultural politics of translating bilingual texts comes into relief. Code-
switching thus becomes a textual window through which we can observe
how the mechanical aspects of translation, including the untranslatability
of dif ferences between codes as well as the asymmetrical levels of heterolin-
gualism in opposite translation directions, belie language ideological issues.
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Chapter 3
Reading the Cultural Other in Translation
Cultural identity in translated literature
The previous chapter examined the textual predicament of translating the
bilingual text against the language ideological background of Singapore.
The literary works in focus are those that expound the motif of loss, that
is, the marginalisation of Chinese language and literature in face of the
hegemony of English. This chapter draws on literary works featuring the
same thematic concern but that do not figure code-switching. It interrogates
the potential interpretive dif ficulties arising from the encounter with the
cultural Other in translation, specifically in the case where the subjectiv-
ity, or Self, of the TT reader is implicated in the discursive constitution
of identity in the ST.
An exemplary concept in cultural studies and especially postcolonial
studies, Otherness evokes both alterity and identity. Studies on the self-
other binary often predicate on linguistic and cultural dif ferences between
two or more communities as determined by territorial boundaries, with
relatively less attention paid to similar dif ferences within a general linguistic
community. In the following sections I present case examples of literary
translation that highlight the tension between linguistic-cultural identities
within the Singapore Chinese community. Rather than focus on textual
issues, which have been dealt with in Chapter 2, I turn my attention instead
to interpretive problems within the theoretical context of translational
ethics. With an eye on language power relations in Singapore, I seek to
theorise an ‘epistemological dilemma’ in the reception of Singapore Chinese
literature in English translation. Specifically, I suggest that there exists a
paradox in reading translations of literary works that operate the ‘motif of
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70 Chapter 3
loss’, i.e. works that dramatise the Chinese cultural crisis in Singapore and
are thus loaded with an intense identity consciousness.
The examples cited in this study come from a bilingual literary anthol-
ogy named Droplets, which was introduced earlier in this book. The prob-
lem with bilingual productions of this kind is that when parallel texts are
presented in en face format, an illusion of equivalence is created and then
taken for granted. For most texts, this would not be an issue; indeed, the
illusion produced might be quite desirable. In the case of literary texts
whose raison d’être is to expound a certain cultural consciousness, the
surface-level symmetry between two versions of the same text might con-
ceal complications in terms of the how ST readers and TT readers inter-
pret their versions respectively. Assuming that readers of a translated text
must be embedded in a particular linguistic and cultural configuration,
they must bring prior assumptions into their reading; in other words, the
reader of the translation is anything but a blank slate of mind to be filled.
Insofar as this applies to all readings of translated (or, for that matter,
non-translated) material, it can be said to be a general phenomenon. The
problem immediately becomes more specific, however, when the subjec-
tivity of the reader of the translated text is at stake; that is, the identity of
the TT reader is implicated in the construction of cultural identity in the
ST and represented as the figure of alterity, the negative Other, vis-à-vis
the Self, as interpreted from the perspective of ST readers.
In the reception of a literary text in translation, a network of relation-
ships involving the ST, translated text and reader of the translated text
comes into play. This chapter asks the question: within the fictional context
where the ‘motif of loss’ is in operation, that is, where English as language
and culture is construed as the discursive Other in a ST, what options does
an anglophone Chinese Singaporean reader have in interpreting the iden-
tity of the sinophone Other (who assumes the position of Self within the
discourse of the fictional text) through translation? A central argument of
this chapter is that the language ideological stance of the reader of trans-
lated texts potentially intervenes in the latter’s interpretation of cultural
identity (i.e. the positionality of Self against a perceived Other) in his/her
reading. Such intervention challenges the ingenuous assumption that the
reader of a translated text may set aside his/her world-view and ‘buy in’
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the identity espoused in the ST unconditionally. I would argue that, in the

case of the Singapore texts in question, the act of reading translated texts
gives rise to an identity tension, which in turn generates ethical implica-
tions for the reading. This is an epistemological problem, for it deals with
how we come to understand the Other – and therefore the Self – through
the mediation of translation. By breaking down the illusion that we can
necessarily come to terms with cultural alterity through translation, the
communicative function of translation is brought into question.
The ethics of dif ference: Berman and Venuti
As a point of departure, we shall first look at some theoretical expositions

on translational ethics. We begin with the late French theorist Berman
(1942–1991), whose ideas originate in the German philosophical tradi-
tion, most notably exemplified by Humboldt and Schleiermacher. Berman
(1984/1992: 5) contends that translation is ethical insofar as it ‘consists of
bringing out, af firming, and defending the pure aim of translation as such’.
What, then, is the ‘pure aim’ of translation? It is, quite simply, the aim of
receiving ‘the Foreign as foreign’ in translation (Berman 1985/2004: 277).
An ethical translation, in other words, enables the foreign text to emerge
in its own terms, as opposed to assimilating it into an established frame of
reference on the part of readers in the target culture. Thus, a good transla-
tion does not block the foreign text from underscoring its alterity.
In this regard, Berman (1984/1992) proposes two kinds of translational
ethics: a positive ethics, that is, a theory of non-ethnocentric translation that
addresses the foreign text fully in terms of its own alterity, and a negative
ethics, a system of ethnocentric translation that domesticates the foreignness
of a ST into the translating culture. According to this binary scheme, a ‘bad
translation’ is one that ‘carries out a systematic negation of the strangeness
of the foreign work’ (ibid.: 5). The opposite of a ‘bad’ translation is one that
enacts a ‘trial of the foreign’ in two senses: first, a translation should ‘open
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72 Chapter 3
up the foreign work to us in its utter foreignness’; second, it should, at the

same time, disassociate the foreign work from its own language ground (sol-
de-langue) (Berman 1985/2004: 276). In his seminal essay ‘Translation and
the Trials of the Foreign’, Berman (1985/2004) criticises the ethnocentric,
annexationist and hypertextual methods frequently adopted in translating
literary texts. These methods invariably result in dif ferent kinds of textual
deformation, or what we might call ‘manipulation’ in contemporary ter-
minology. Berman maintains that these deforming tendencies collectively
create the ‘negative analytic’ of translation and result in a deviation of the
translated text from the essential aim of translation: to reveal the alterity of
the foreign culture through the target language. As a reaction to this ‘nega-
tive analytic’, a ‘positive analytic’ of translation is advanced to neutralise
ethnocentric forces in translation. This is achieved through literalism – the
use of word-for-word rendering, which would ‘respect the original in its
radical alterity’ (Hermans 2009: 98).
Berman’s scheme may sound idealistic, but has since been developed
by his advocates in the English-speaking world into convincing and popu-
lar theories. One of these advocates – and a very high-profile one at that
– is the US-based scholar Lawrence Venuti, who has not only translated
Berman’s work into English but worked his ideas into a systematic critique
of English-language translation as practised in the Anglo-American world.
In his polemic treatise The Translator’s Invisibility (Venuti 2008a), he pre-
sents abundant evidence to support his case that literary translation into
English often performs an anglo-centric annexation of the cultural alter-
ity of a ST. The source text is often transplanted forcibly into a rhetorical,
stylistic and ideological framework that is fully familiar to the TT reader,
thus becoming alienated from its source and aligned to the world-view of
the readers of the translated text. In Berman’s terminology, this type of
ethnocentric translation manifests a negative ethics the objective of which
is ‘to bring back a cultural other as the recognizable, the familiar, even the
same’ (ibid.: 14). This is in contradistinction to a positive ethics of trans-
lation, which seeks ‘to reveal the foreign work’s most original kernel, its
most deeply buried, most self-same, but equally the most “distant” from
itself ’ (Berman 1985/2004: 276).
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To rectify this state of af fairs, Venuti advances a strategy that is vari-

ously called foreignising, minoritising and defamiliarising (Hermans 2009:
99) in literary translation. Strictly speaking, this is not an original formula-
tion; it is a more sophisticated extension of the literal approach proposed
by Schleiermacher (1813/2004), Benjamin (1923/2004) and Berman. What
Venuti’s scheme aims to do is to exploit ‘all the registers of English, includ-
ing anachronisms and slang, to inscribe dif ference in the translation itself,
leave on the text a translator’s imprint’ (Hermans 2009: 99; cf. the notion of
abusive fidelity, Lewis 1985). It is a resistant strategy that seeks to foreground
rather than suppress heterogeneity. This is achieved through a non-f luent
approach that disrupts the f low of the translated discourse, thus bringing
readers’ attention to the ruptures within the translated text, shattering any
illusion that the target language can adequately and suf ficiently represent
the source language and culture.
Both Berman and Venuti emphasise an ethics of dif ference in trans-
lation, whereby the foreignness of the source culture is f lagged out by
manipulating target language resources. The ultimate aim of their project is
to prevent ‘the imposition of the conventions and values of the translating
culture on imported texts, with the ef facement of their cultural dif ference
as a result’ (Hermans 2009: 98). The ethical thrust here is premised on a
dichotomy between Self and Other that is often drawn on the basis of
national-linguistic grounds, and the proposed solutions in relation to the
representation of Otherness in translation are invariably textual. While this
chapter similarly concerns itself with the ethics of dif ference, my focus is
on the interpretive problems that emerge in reading the cultural Other in
translation, rather than on its textual (mis)representation. If domestication,
in Venuti’s sense, ‘prevents an engagement with cultural dif ference because
foreign texts, whatever their origins, are uniformly pressed into homely
moulds’ (Hermans 2009: 98), such engagement with alterity can also be
blocked when the cultural identity of the TT reader interferes with his/
her interpretation of the identity function of the original text. Due to its
epistemological nature, the problem cannot be tackled by textual means;
it permeates every reading of a translated text where language ideological
tension is evoked, potentially undermining the communicative function
of translation.
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74 Chapter 3
In order to illustrate the ef fect that language ideology may have on

literary interpretation in translation, I have chosen texts that operate the
motif of loss. To recapitulate, ‘loss’ here refers specifically to the attrition
in the inf luence of Chinese language and culture on younger generations
of Chinese Singaporeans. Literary works with this motif often display a
clear judgmental value with regards cultural identity: while anglophone
Chinese Singaporeans are the Other who have abandoned their heritage,
their sinophone counterparts are the last cultural survivors in a society
where the hegemony of English is increasingly evident. Such texts, there-
fore, exude an almost patriotic sense of Chinese cultural consciousness,
hence allowing us to gauge the impact of this consciousness on the recep-
tion of their translations. As will be explained below, I am dealing with one
particular group of readers, namely, anglophone Chinese Singaporeans,
for the identity of these readers is involved – ‘other-ed’, to be exact – in the
construction of identity in the texts in question, which complicates the
act of interpretation. Drawing on Berman’s formulation, I postulate two
positions that anglophone Chinese Singaporean readers of the translated
text may assume. First, the readers can interpret the sinophone Other as
Self and themselves as Other; this leads to a positive ethics, in the sense
that the identity function of the text remains intact. Second, the readers
can impose their Self onto their reading of the text; such a reading would
marginalise the Other, compromise the identity function of the text and
give rise to a negative ethics. As I will explain below, each of these stances is
untenable in its own way. In the first case, readers are required to perform
the ironic act of ‘self-othering’; that is, they undermine their own identity
in order to achieve an understanding of the Other. In the second case,
where readers resist the imperative of the text to advocate Chineseness,
the function or ‘skopos’ of the translation would not have been achieved.
This impasse creates an epistemological dilemma on the part of the reader,
thus raising the question of how the cultural Other can/should be read
in translation.
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The target readership
Translated fiction is a dif ferent creature from non-translated fiction. The

critical dif ference between the two lies, of course, in the nature of their
reception, which is essentially how readers interpret their texts. Scholars
have pointed out that reception ‘is a dif ferent operation in the case of trans-
lated fiction as compared to original fiction, for readers have to actively use
the arsenal of cultural as well as cross-cultural knowledge that they carry
with them to their reading’ (Chan 2010: 8). It is therefore crucial that we
identify the projected readers of the textual material to be discussed. In
focus here is the bilingual anthology Droplets, which was brief ly introduced
in the first chapter, and from which examples were drawn for discussion in
the second chapter. In the introduction to this anthology, the editor states
that one of the objectives of the anthology
is historical, aiming to collect together the works of several authors from the 1980s,
all of which deal with the at times sensitive topic of the status of Chinese language
and culture in Singapore. […] The collection thus aims to document the importance
of this particular question for the Chinese-speaking community in Singapore, which
was dealt with directly or indirectly by many contemporary authors, by bringing
them together. (St André 2001: 15, my emphasis)
From this quotation one can determine that the sinophone community in
Singapore – more specifically, the Chinese-speaking Chinese community
– constitutes the target readership of the original Chinese works collected
in the anthology. Who, then, are the target readers of the English transla-
tions of these Chinese works? The editor explains that:
there were at least two groups being targeted: adult Singaporeans who could not
read Chinese, and therefore do not have access to or even knowledge of a large body
of literature written by their fellow-Singaporeans on an important contemporary
issue, and school children currently learning Chinese in secondary school. For the
first group, we hope that reading these stories, essays, and poems will provide the
opportunity to learn how Chinese-speaking Chinese in Singapore felt (and, in many
cases, still feel) about the changing nature of Singaporean society roughly between
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76 Chapter 3
independence and 1990. For the second group, we hope that the stories may encour-
age students to persevere in their study of Chinese at least through their A levels, if
not at the university level. (ibid.: 15, 17; my emphasis)
We are concerned with only the first group of readers identified in the quo-
tation above, as the second group (i.e. secondary school students learning
the Chinese language) is aimed at for pedagogic purposes and is thus not
immediately relevant to the discussion on hand. The ‘important contem-
porary issue’ mentioned by the editor refers to the ‘contemporary crisis in
traditional Chinese culture among Singaporean Chinese’ (St André 2001:
11) which, as mentioned in the first chapter, is established as the overarching
theme of the anthology. We are told that one of the two target reader groups
of the English translations in the anthology consists of ‘adult Singaporeans
who could not read Chinese’ (ibid.). Who are these readers exactly? The
editor does not give us a direct answer, which is nonetheless inferable
from the sociolinguistic context of Singapore. The target readership of the
Chinese literary works, identified as ‘the Chinese-speaking community
of Singapore’ (ibid.), would refer to the ethnic Chinese community in
Singapore. However, recalling the sociolinguistics of Singapore outlined
in the first chapter of this study, in particular the fact that English has
become the only language spoken confidently for many young Singaporeans
(Lim and Foley 2004: 6), one finds that the Chinese-speaking commu-
nity in Singapore is not congruent with the ethnic Chinese community
of Singapore. The category ‘Chinese-speaking (Chinese) community’ is
rather a subset of the category ‘ethnic Chinese community’, the other subset
being constituted by ethnic Chinese Singaporeans for whom Chinese is
not a primary spoken language.
I would therefore suggest that the anglophone Chinese community
in Singapore is the principal target readership of the English translated
works in Droplets. The most important clue lies in the editor’s statement
that the anthology seeks to of fer ‘adult Chinese Singaporeans who could
not read Chinese’ the chance to understand ‘how Chinese-speaking
Chinese Singaporeans felt (and, in many ways, still feel) about the chang-
ing nature of Singaporean society’ (see quotation above). Here it is note-
worthy that in the key phrase ‘Chinese-speaking Chinese Singaporeans’,
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the word ‘Chinese-speaking’ is marked when juxtaposed with the phrase

‘Chinese Singaporeans’. One who is unfamiliar with the language situa-
tion in Singapore might find this an apparent redundancy, for it seems
superf luous to specify the language spoken by a Chinese Singaporean which,
on the face of it, would seem quite obvious. In actual fact, there is no redun-
dancy here. The use of the word ‘Chinese-speaking’ in modification of the
phrase ‘Chinese Singaporeans’ points to the sociolinguistic fact that there
are many Chinese Singaporeans (especially those of the younger genera-
tion) who are predominantly English-speaking rather than predominantly
Chinese-speaking (Lim and Foley 2004: 6).
Based on the markedness of the notion of ‘Chinese-speaking’ with
respect to the ethnic category ‘Chinese Singaporeans’, and with reference
to the power relation between English and Chinese in Singapore, I would
argue that the linguistic community labelled ‘Chinese-speaking Chinese
Singaporeans’ evokes the linguistic community in diametrical opposi-
tion to it, i.e. English-speaking Chinese Singaporeans, and discursively
establishes these anglophone Chinese as the primary target readers of the
English translations of the Chinese texts in the anthology. This is not to
say that Malay and Tamil-speaking Singaporeans – who too technically
fall under the category ‘adult Singaporeans who could not read Chinese’
– are excluded from the target readership of the anthology. But based on
the demographic fact that the ethnic Chinese constitute a vast majority of
the Singaporean population and on the trend that an increasing number of
Chinese Singaporeans are unable to communicate at ease in their mother
tongue language, it may be posited that anglophone Chinese Singaporeans
are positioned as the core group of target readers.
The identification of this target readership is essential for the discus-
sion that follows. Here I draw upon the notion of the hypothetical reader
(Iser 1972/1974; Booth 1974/1983) and hold the assumption, in line with
Chan (2010: 22), that:
[e]ach reader’s experience of a text may be dif ferent from that of any other, so that
as many text worlds can presumably be constituted as there are reading subjects, yet
the fact remains that readers of a translation react dif ferently from those who read a
non-translation. To stress individual dif ferences virtually renders futile any ef fort to
analyze the response of readers other than those singled out for empirical analysis.
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78 Chapter 3
Along with reader response theorists, this chapter further assumes that
interpretation is conditioned by the contextual parameters that operate
within the larger cultural environment in which readers are embedded.
In other words, the ‘conceptual grid operating within a particular inter-
pretive community is the key to figuring out textual meanings’ (ibid.: 30).
In the present study, this conceptual grid takes the form of the language
ideological background of anglophone Chinese readers, which may af fect
the latter’s interpretation of Chinese literature in translation. Specifically,
this chapter looks at the (mis)articulation of cultural identity on the part
of this group of hypothetical readers. The emphasis is on how alterity is
negotiated in their reading of texts-in-translation, in which ‘Chineseness’
is a much cherished identity. In the following, I will demonstrate that the
polarised linguistic and cultural subjectivities of the projected target readers
of the Chinese texts and their English translations have crucial implications
for understanding how translating interacts and interferes with the inter-
pretation of identity. In doing so I am in agreement with Chan (ibid.: 26)
that ‘fictional works invariably encourage their readers to take up subject
positions in relation to the imagined others’ and that the ‘encounter of the
Self with the Other […] is exemplified in a special way by the dynamics of
text-reader interaction as it pertains to a translation’.
Translating anglophobic/sinophilic poetry into English1
Earlier in this book, I noted that the motif of loss is in operation in a con-
siderable number of literary works written by Singaporean Chinese writers,
who often ‘reify a timeless ‘Chinese culture’ which Singaporean Chinese
1 The terms ‘anglophobic’ and ‘sinophilic’ are respectively used in Ho (2010) to denote
anti-colonial (i.e. anti-British) and pro-Chinese ideological stances with refer-
ence to contemporary Hong Kong literature. The term ‘anglophilic’, on the other
hand, refers to pro-British sentiments. I have adapted these dichotomous pairs to
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are exhorted to remember and admonished not to forget’ (St André 2006a:
40). This thematic concern with the preservation of Chinese culture points
to a sinophilic stance on the part of the Chinese authors, which, in the
Singaporean context, necessarily implicates an ideological position that is
anglophobic. The latter position is often realised in the form of a lament
or satire on the (negative) inf luence of English language and culture on
younger generations of Chinese Singaporeans. Consider the following
poem, entitled Yuyeji, first written in Chinese and then translated into
English as Stormy Night. The poem is collected in the bilingual anthol-
ogy Droplets, whose thematic-ideological thrust, as we may recall, is ‘the
contemporary crisis in traditional Chinese culture among Singaporean
Chinese’ (St André 2001: 11). Placed within this context, the poem can
thus be profitably read as an expression of anglophobic and sinophilic
sentiments on the part of the Chinese-speaking community, of which the
poet is a member.
雨夜记 Stormy Night

/朱德春 by Choo Teck Song
午夜惊醒 Jolted awake at midnight

发现在窗外喧嚣的 Only to realize the clamour outside my window
竟是西风 Was the west wind;
雨正以破坏的速度 With destructive speed, the rain poured down
蹂躏这片吾爱 Trampling on my beloved,
祖先曾辛勤拓荒的 The land our forefathers worked hard to open up
土地 Our soil.
the context of my discussion, where anglophobic/sinophilic sentiments refer to a

cultural disposition towards Chinese, coupled with a fear for the latter’s survival
in face of the hegemony of English. In contrast, anglophilic and sinophobic senti-
ments refer to an inclination towards Anglo-Saxon cultures in general and a fear
of Chineseness.
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80 Chapter 3
土地上有热带风情的椰树 In this soil, grew tropical coconut trees,

有移植生根的橡树 Transplanted rubber trees,
有东方古典的松树 And oriental classical pines.
怎么竟在一夜之间 Why have they, in the space of one night,
在自己的土地上受到西风骤雨的 Been subjected to the attack of the violent western gale
吹袭 On their own soil?
我急急推窗远眺 Hurriedly, I pushed the window open

要看清楚这风雨之夜的轮廓 To see clearly, the outline of this stormy night.
究竟西风横吹到几时 How much longer would the westerly wind continue to blow?
究竟多少落木萧萧下 How many more trees would continue to fall silently?
不用说你也会知道 Needless to say

扎根最深的不会轻易倒下 Those with the deepest roots, were not to be uprooted easily;
只有香蕉树最没有骨气 Only the banana tree, lacking resilience,
黄皮肤下竟裸裎着白色思想 Under its yellow skin, exposed its white thoughts.2
This poem abounds in familiar tropes that highlight the ideological stance
of the author. The figure xifeng [westerly wind] appears three times in the
text and, together with the figure of pouring rain, is metaphoric of the
inf luence of languages and cultures broadly associated with the West.3
The figure of the ‘westerly wind’ collocates with verbs, both in their verbal
and nominalised forms, that carry negative connotations, such as xuan
xiao [clamour], chuixi [attack] and hengchui [to blow laterally]. Similarly,
the figure of rain is associated with negative images, namely, pohuai [to
destroy] and roulin [to trample]. Both figures are construed as the cause of
2 Original Chinese text first published in Shahua《砂话》(Singapore: Zhongwai

fanyi shuyeshe, 1989) and collected in St André (2001: 264–7). English translation
published in St André (2001: 264–7).
3 In contemporary Chinese, the word feng [wind] can serve as a kind of quasi-suf fix
(as in in the derivative compound han’guo feng, which refers to Korean culture as
it is imported into a non-Korean cultural entity. In this case the word feng loses its
lexical meaning, taking on the extended meaning of ‘a strong external inf luence’. The
‘westerly wind’ metaphor in the poem taps into this figurative meaning of the word.
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destructive circumstances, such as the fall of trees in the third stanza. On
the other hand, the figure of trees, together with those of soil and roots, is
counterpoint to the figures of westerly wind and rain, and is crucial to the
interpretation of the poem. The poem taps into the conventional trope of
‘roots’, which is metaphoric of one’s cultural origins. Thus, trees (specifi-
cally, coconut trees, rubber trees and pines, which conjure up the image
of the Far East in general and Southeast Asia in particular), deeply rooted
in their soil, symbolise Chinese Singaporeans who are fully entrenched in
their ethnic language and culture, but who are constantly under the threat
of the treacherous rain and ‘westerly wind’ – the language and culture of
the West.
The last stanza of the poem brings to the fore the ideological stance of
the author with the image of the ‘banana tree’, a stock, colloquial expression
of mockery used in Singaporean parole to refer to Chinese Singaporeans
who are linguistically and/or culturally inclined towards the West. Just as
a banana has a yellow skin and whitish f lesh, an ethnic Chinese (who has
‘yellow’ skin) who does not embrace his/her Chinese culture emotionally
is deemed to be ‘white’ on the ‘inside’ (i.e. in terms of his ‘internal’ cul-
tural preferences), the latter colour being associated with the skin colour
of Caucasians and thus generally evocative of Western culture. The poem
concludes with the lamentation that banana trees are uprooted easily by
the westerly wind due to a lack of ‘resilience’. This uprooting indicates the
de-culturalisation of anglophone Chinese (i.e. the ‘bananas’) who at the
same time cannot claim a genuinely Western identity. It is at this point
that the poet gives his final critique of English-speaking/English-educated
Chinese Singaporeans who have forgotten their Chinese ‘roots’, and his
approval of Chinese-speaking/Chinese-educated Chinese Singaporeans
for their cultural resilience and rootedness.
On another analogical level, it is possible to read the poem as articulat-
ing the ‘swaying’ of local Singaporean culture under the inf luence of glo-
balising (predominantly Western) forces. With this reading, the images of
coconut trees, rubber trees and oriental pines would represent the Indian,
Malay and Chinese communities in Singapore respectively (by virtue of the
geographical origins of these species), thereby constituting a distinctively
local entity. From this perspective, the theme of the poem would not be
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82 Chapter 3
anglophobia or sinophilia per se, but rather the dynamics of a local-global

tension. In this respect, the poem is a good example of how dif ficult it is to
restrict considerations of language issues in Singapore to a simplistic binary
opposition, such as sinophone versus anglophone identities. Other modali-
ties, including the relationship between Malay and English as well as that
between Malay and Chinese, complicate the cultural politics of language
issues. However, given that the poem is collected in the Chinese–English
anthology Droplets, and that the objective of this anthology is to ‘portray
a Chinese-speaking community extremely concerned with the relationship
between language, race and cultural identity’ (St André 2001: 17), it should
be possible to read the poem as enacting the language ideological tension
between the Sinophones and the Anglophones within the Singaporean
Chinese community. This dual opposition is, of course, an oversimplifi-
cation of the sociolinguistic dynamics in Singapore, but it is a persistent
motif in the local literature.
Given the ideological context and target readership of the bilingual
anthology Droplets, what are the implications of translating this poem into
English? What happens when a poem that construes ‘banana trees’ in a
negative light is read by the very referents of this mocking expression? In
other words, how does the act of rendering the Chinese poem in English
elaborate or problematise the micro-politics of anglophobia/sinophilia
inherent in the theme of the original text? At stake here is how we can
reconcile the anglophobic/sinophilic stance in the original poem and the
indexical role inscribed in the translating language, i.e. English. While
translating the Chinese poem does, theoretically speaking, make available
the thematic concern of the poem to a wider audience, this function can
at the same time be compromised due to the ideological relation between
English and Chinese, as represented in the poetic realm and as it is in actual
Singapore society. The role of English as the target language constitutes a
critical point of deixis between the source and target texts: the rebirth of
the Chinese poem in English immediately points back (hence the ‘deictic’
nature of the translation) to the primacy of Chinese as constitutive of the
cultural memory reified by the author (St André 2006a), and to the oth-
erness of English as the hegemonic language. The reading of the Chinese
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poem in English recalls, simultaneously and paradoxically, English as the

language of the Other in its original context.
In this situation, where anglophone readers (who are themselves
Chinese Singaporeans) receive a text, inscribed in English, about the
marginalisation of Chinese language and culture under the hegemony of
English language and ‘Western’ culture, the politics of identity comes to
the fore. Taken as a double, the two versions of the same text give rise to
the ironic message that in an attempt to preserve Chinese language and
culture under the hegemony of English, the poem needs to be transmit-
ted in English (the language with a higher symbolic capital) in order to
reach a readership beyond the sinophone community. This brings us back,
once again, to the translation of Speak White, the French poem written
to advance the Québec nationalist cause of protecting the French-based
identity against the domination of English. Mezei (1998: 239), as cited
earlier, suggests that the translation of this anti-anglophone French poem
into English constitutes ‘a potent irony’, whereby English is being used
against the English.
To what extent might this ‘potent irony’ also be found in the translation
of Yuyeji as Stormy Night? First and foremost, there is a tension between the
indexical role that English plays in the ST (i.e. its constructed position as
the negative Other) and its discursive role in the TT (i.e. its inherent posi-
tion as the material medium constituting the textuality of the translation).
More importantly, translating the Chinese poem with an anglophobic/
sinophilic stance into English turns the translating language onto itself
and triggers an ironic self-ref lexivity on the part of the TT reader. For
instance, how should anglophone readers respond to the image of ‘banana
trees’ in the poem? Should they map this negative image of a Westernised
Chinese person who lacks cultural ‘resilience’ onto themselves, thus joining
the author in deriding the ‘rootlessness’ of Chinese Singaporeans who are
detached from Chinese language and culture? Or should they reject this
reading and adopt instead an anglophilic stance to resist an anglophobic
interpretation?
This is the potential dilemma facing the anglophone readers as they
interpret a literary piece with an anglophobic theme. One may argue that
this sense of being estranged in one’s own language obtains in the reading
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84 Chapter 3
of translated literature in general, and is therefore not quite specific to the
case of Singapore. But the usual conf lict between Self and Other gains a
further dimension in our case, given that the target readers in question
are Chinese Singaporeans who are predominantly English-speaking and
therefore do not have access to the original Chinese text. Such readers
are not neutral parties; rather, their Selves are implicated in the reception
process, as they bring their language and cultural identities to bear on the
translated text. It would be impractical to assume that readers might be
able to abandon their identity as they enter a (translated) fictional world,
to read the translation with a clean slate of mind, so to speak. Reception
theories have informed us indeed that readers bring a host of assumptions
and experiences into their reading; readers respond to a text based on a
‘conceptual grid operating within a particular interpretive community’
(Chan 2010: 30; Fish 1980). But I am not suggesting here that an English-
speaking Singaporean reader must adopt an ideological position that is char-
acteristically anglophilic or sinophobic, though this is a potentially viable
stance. Neither am I invalidating the enterprise of translating the Chinese
identity crisis in Singapore for an English readership. The attempt to bring
across the predicament of Chinese language and culture in Singapore to the
cultural Other should indeed be celebrated as a bid to enact interlingual
and intercultural communication, which is essential for the sustenance of
a multilingual society. However, it would be equally naïve to suppose that
some kind of ideal middle ground can be struck between the two cultural
positions, that English readers – in particular, English-speaking Chinese
Singaporean readers – can fully come to grasp with the starkly anglophobic
position in the Chinese poem, while af firming their own cultural identity
at the same time.
The issue at hand here is epistemic – how can we know about the
Other through translation? I propose that within the translational space
between English and Chinese presides an epistemic indeterminacy, a con-
stant f lux that negotiates between the two endpoints of ideal communica-
tion and total incommunicability. The exposition in this and subsequent
sections seeks to problematise the communication process by pointing
out that textual equivalence in translation does not guarantee communi-
cation across linguistic and cultural boundaries. In a multilingual society
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in which language ideological relations are sensitive, what is at issue is not

how textual elements may be properly transposed from one language into
another, but how the ideological implications of translation may impinge
upon its reception and compromise its intended purpose.
I further contend that the act of translating the Chinese poem into
English amplifies the anglophobic/sinophilic stance underlying the theme
of the ST. The urge to translate in order to communicate a cultural pre-
dicament points to a desire to enable the anglophone Other to access
knowledge concerning the sinophone Self, with the assumption that some
kind of communication (in this case, both interlingual and intercultural)
might be achievable. But the cultural Other is always already embedded in
the identity constitution of Self as its mirror image. The case of translating
the Chinese poem is problematic beyond the textual plane because the
anglophobic/sinophilic stance of the Chinese text already assumes as its
dual opposite an anglophilic/sinophobic position. The act of translating,
through reinscribing the Chinese poem in a language that exemplifies the
culture of the English-speaking Chinese community in Singapore, aug-
ments the tension between the two cultural dispositions as represented
in the metaphors of the poem. The desire of the Chinese-speaking Self to
translate its identity thus forms a deictic loop that points to the English-
speaking Other inherent in its construction, eventually pointing back to
the marginalised condition of this Chinese-speaking Self. Rather than
providing a discursive outlet through which two linguistic and cultural
communities may communicate, translation has the potential to exacer-
bate the cultural anxiety and identity crisis faced by the Chinese-speaking
Self in the ST.
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86 Chapter 3
Kan Hua/The Painting
Lin Gao’s Kan Hua/The Painting (St André 2001: 118–23) tells the story
of a young Chinese couple who show complete ignorance of traditional
Chinese culture, as embodied in a Chinese painting. At the start of the
story, the narrator visits the young couple, a Mr and Mrs Teo, who have
recently moved in next door, and witnesses an interaction between the
young couple and the husband’s uncle about a Chinese painting depicting
lotus amidst water, a favourite motif in Chinese paintings. The narrator is
evidently one who is well-versed in traditional Chinese culture, as shown
in his ability to identify a seal on the painting as that belonging to the
Qianlong emperor of the Qing dynasty of imperial China, and his ability
to decipher the inscription on the painting by Tang Yin/Tang Bo Hu, a
famous scholar-artist of the Ming dynasty. The narrator’s knowledge of
the Chinese painting contrasts sharply with the young couple’s ignorance
on the same subject. The following conversation between Mrs Teo and Mr
Teo’s uncle is satirical of the former’s unfamiliarity with Chinese culture:
Source Text
那位姑丈说了一段唐寅的故事。女主人发生兴趣了，问道：
“谁是唐寅？”
“就是唐伯虎嘛，还是文学家呢！”
“还活着吗？在中国？”
“是明朝的人呀！哈哈哈。”
“死啦，画一定很值钱啦！”
“这是复制的。—— 真迹就好了。”
“复制？你妈怎么买一件复制品回来。”
女主人转头瞪了丈夫一眼，不高兴了。画原来是张先生的母亲从中国带
回来送给他们的。
Translated Text
Mr Teo’s uncle narrated a part of Tang Yin’s story and this aroused Mrs Teo’s inter-
est. She asked, ‘Who is Tang Yin?’
‘Tang Yin is Tang Bo Hu. He was also a great literati.’
‘Is he still alive? In China?’
‘He lived during the Ming Dynasty! Ha! Ha!’
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‘Dead! So his painting must be worth a lot then.’

‘This is a replica – how great it would be if it were an authentic work!’
‘Replica? Why did your mum buy a replica?’
Mrs Teo turned and gave her husband a hard glare of displeasure. Mr Teos’ mother
had bought the painting in China as a gift for them.
In this scene, the author mocks at Mrs Teo’s lack of what may be considered
basic knowledge in Chinese culture, as Tang Yin/Tang Bo Hu is a canonical
figure in traditional Chinese art and calligraphy, immortalised in popular
Chinese culture in tales on his romantic liaisons. It is worth noting that
this lack of cultural knowledge is closely tied to the negative trait of mate-
rialism, as can be seen from Mrs Teo’s obsession with the economic rather
than cultural value of the painting. This association of a lack of interest in
Chinese language and culture among ethnic Chinese – and in the ideo-
logical context of Singapore, this usually means an inclination towards
English language and Western culture – and materialism is common in
of ficial rhetoric in Singapore (Wee and Bokhorst-Heng 2005). It is also a
discursive connection that is often exploited in the local Chinese literature.
The references to Chinese art and to China in the passage above
clearly point to the cultural orientation of the story. To the target read-
ers of the original text, whom we have established as sinophone Chinese
Singaporeans, the interpretation of the scene is unproblematic. The Chinese
cultural orientation adopted by the narrator and Mr Teo’s uncle is not
embraced by Mr and Mrs Teo, to whom Chinese culture is marginalised as
the culture of Other. This sense of marginalisation is arguably something
that sinophone readers can resonate with or may even have experienced,
from the vantage point of their language ideological stance. These readers
could thus appreciate the author’s satire of Mr and Mrs Teo as exemplifying
the ‘Westernised’ Chinese Singaporean through a portrayal their ignorance
of the Chinese painting. The author and his sinophone target readers are
thus on the same side of the translation equation: they adopt the identity
of the cultural Self, as opposed to the identity embodied by Mr and Mrs
Teo, the cultural Other. To the sinophone Chinese Singaporean reader,
Kan Hua evokes and reinforces the ‘We-Chinese-speaking-Cultural’ and
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‘They-English-speaking-Materialist’ dichotomy that is deeply seated in the

psyche of the Chinese-speaking Chinese community in Singapore.
In the English translation of the story, an inherent dif ficulty arises
with regard to how the TT should be read and interpreted by an English-
speaking Chinese Singaporean reader. This is a phenomenon which I call
an ‘epistemological dilemma’. The dilemma is ‘epistemological’ in the sense
that it relates to the interpretation and understanding of identity; spe-
cifically, it is about the problematic nature of knowing who the Self and
Other represent in translation. The dilemma occurs as a consequence of
the fact that the language ideological values that the TT reader subscribes
to are potentially, though by no means certainly, dif ferent from those
of the ST reader. In the scene cited above, we have seen how the story
construes Mrs Teo (or the young couple as a unit) as the cultural Other,
in relation to the sinophone author/reader of the ST. This would mean
that the target reader of the translated text, whom we have established as
an anglophone Chinese Singaporean, belongs by default to the discursive
category of Other in the context of the story. Now we need to confront
the critical question: what interpretive position should an anglophone
Chinese Singaporean reader take in respect to the identity function of
the text in translation?
I postulate two options with regards the stance that an anglophone
Chinese Singaporean reader can assume. One possibility is for this reader
to stand on the same side of the ST/TT equation as the source text author
and sinophone reader in empathising with the marginalised condition of
Chinese language and culture and in critiquing the hegemonic dominance
of English language and Western culture. But this interpretive option can
be quite problematic because, as pointed out earlier, the projected reader
of the English translation is technically a ‘member’ of the cultural Other
and is therefore theoretically the object of satire in the original Chinese
text. The anglophone reader of the translated text does not assume a default
‘We’ position vis-à-vis the sinophone reader of the ST by virtue of the
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fact that the former stands in ideological opposition to the latter from the
perspective of the source text.4
Let us now consider the alternative position, whereby anglophone
Chinese Singaporean readers of the translated text empathise with the
cultural Other as constructed in the story and personified by the young
couple. These readers may be able to identify with the young couple, as
the latter are supposed to be their literary representation. But if such
identification were to occur, the anglophone readers of the translated
text would be standing at odds with the sinophone readers of the original
text in terms of their language and cultural identity, and would thus not
be able to ef fect dynamic equivalence in terms of their understanding of
the text. Specifically, while the ST evokes in its readers a sense of disap-
proval for anglophone Chinese Singaporeans who alienate themselves
from Chinese language and culture (or who have been alienated as a result
of their education and upbringing), the translated text could potentially
evoke in anglophone readers a degree of identification with the same
group of people. The skopos of the translation, which is to enable English-
speaking Chinese Singaporeans to understand the cultural predicament
of their Chinese-speaking counterparts (St André 2001: 15), could then
be contradicted.
The interpretive questions arising from the translation of Kanhua into
The Painting draw us into a hermeneutical puzzle. From which position
should readers of the translated text attempt to interpret the identity func-
tion of the text? How do they begin to understand the sinophone Other
from the perspective of the anglophone Self, when the latter is in fact the
Other from the vantage point of the ST? Should readers of the translated
text lend their emotional support to the young couple in the story (thus
implicitly agreeing that anglophone Chinese Singaporeans can or should
abandon their language and cultural roots)? Adopting this stance would be
4 If these anglophone readers were proficient in Chinese at the same time, they would
have the option of reading the original text, in which case the interpretive problem
might not exist, as such readers can stride both sides of the ST/TT equation more
or less at ease. As mentioned earlier, though, such bilingual readers are excluded from
this discussion.
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90 Chapter 3
tantamount to defending the anglophone self and resisting the sinophone

other. Or should they feel accountable for being part of the community
that perpetuates linguistic and cultural hegemony in Singapore, thereby
alienating the self and identifying with the other? This is a critical dilemma
that the Singaporean reader of translated Chinese literature is confronted
with. It questions the common assumption that the construct of Chinese
identity, together with the cultural crisis that the sinophone community
faces, is translatable across linguistic boundaries to reach members of the
cultural Other, with the ultimate aim of facilitating understanding between
‘Us’ and ‘Them’. My argument is that even if the Chinese text is entirely
translatable into English on the linguistic level, translation creates episte-
mological barriers that raise questions about the interpretive limits of the
text in translation.
In the process of analysing the interpretive positions of the reader of
the translated text, I seem to have conjured more questions than I have
answered. But this is the very nature of the issue at hand. Instead of pro-
viding any definitive answer to the problem of how a translated text can be
interpreted in terms of its identity function, I seek to expose the ambiva-
lence inherent in such interpretation. This ambivalence points to the uneasy
manner in which the English translation of a Chinese literary text loaded
with a strong Chinese consciousness can be read in relation to both its
original text and its own socio-cultural context. I propose that the readers
of the English translation are inevitably caught in a Catch-22 situation, so
to speak – between loyalty to the identity of ‘We’ in the Chinese text (and
hence betrayal of their anglophone identity) and loyalty to their anglophone
identity (and hence betrayal of the identity of ‘We’ in the ST). The reader
may theoretically occupy a position at either end, or anywhere along the
continuum between the two extremes. In this regard, the interpretation of
the translated text may be seen as indefinite and ambiguous, which renders
its meaning infinitely deferred, to use Derrida’s terms.
To close this section, let me illustrate the dilemma with another pas-
sage from the same text:
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Source Text
一个月后，我给他们送去一张水墨小品。
画的是浮萍。绿意正茂，白花几朵，有只蛙正踢腿游出水来。题的是：
蛙得水域，浮萍无踪。
不知道年轻夫妇把我的画挂上去了吗？
挂上去，他们看出什么东西没有。
Translated Text
I gave them an ink-wash creation a month later.
I drew them a picture of duckweed, lush green with several white f lowers.
There was a frog kicking its legs, emerging above the water. The inscription read ‘The
frog gains its territory but the duckweed has disappeared.’
I wonder if the couple has hung up my painting.
If they have hung it up, I wonder if they noticed anything special.
This extract is highly metaphorical in meaning. The image of the rootless
duckweed is often used by Chinese writers to metaphorise people who
have lost or abandoned their own cultural origin. As mentioned in my
earlier analysis of the poem Stormy Nights, the ‘root’ image symbolises the
source of one’s cultural identity. It is used in the same sense here to mock
the cultural alienation of the young Chinese couple. In the English transla-
tion, a footnote that does not exist in the original Chinese text appears as
follows: ‘The frog, being part of Nature, has found its true place, while the
‘rootless’ nature of the duckweed makes them f loat aimlessly above water.
The author uses this as a metaphor for Chinese who do not know how to
speak their mother tongue and lack cultural roots’ (St André 2001: 123).
It is the paratext rather than the text proper that warrants our attention
here. The existence of the footnote points to the translator’s expectation that
the anglophone reader would have no access to the metaphorical meaning
behind the image of the f loating duckweed. But the use of this footnote
also points to the complex relation between Self and Other in transla-
tion. Readers of the original Chinese text derive their aesthetic experience
through the knowledge that the target of the metaphor is their cultural
Other, i.e. anglophone Chinese Singaporeans who have lost their ‘roots’.
But for the prospective anglophone readers of the English translation, can
the same experience be achieved, considering that they constitute the very
target of the metaphor in the story? In order for the translation to work,
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92 Chapter 3
anglophone readers should theoretically have to understand this metaphor

from the perspective of their sinophone counterparts. For this group of
readers, this would mean adopting a language ideological stance that posi-
tions them as the Other, thus leading them to perform a self-derogatory
act of reading themselves in negative light – as rootless duckweeds f loating
‘aimlessly above water’. In other words, if anglophone readers are expected to
understand the English translation as sinophone readers would understand
the original Chinese text (and such expectation can be said to be implicit
in the desired objective of the translation to enable anglophone Chinese
Singaporeans to understand the Chinese identity crisis in Singapore), the
mockery intended by the metaphor would have to turn into a kind of self-
mockery, and the act of reading the translation an act of self-Othering.
The explanatory footnote thus paradoxically exposes the gap in iden-
tity interpretation between source and target text readers at the same time
as it attempts to fill it. The bridging of this gap is more than a matter of
cross-linguistic transfer; it is a deeper-level epistemological issue. It involves
anglophone Chinese Singaporean readers in ironically yet unavoidably
reading themselves as the cultural Other in their negotiation of the iden-
tity meaning of the text.
Guji de lian/A Lonely Face
As a third example, let us examine the problem of translating identity in an

extract from Yeng Puay Ngon’s novel Guji de lian/A Lonely Face (St André
2001: 124–35). Guji de lian is a Chinese autobiographical novel about the
emotional plight of a Chinese-educated and sinophone Singaporean man
who feels ostracised in a predominantly English-speaking society. What is
striking about this novel is the way in which the protagonist construes his
own ‘Chinese’ identity as the cultural Other, which foregrounds the impact
that a predominantly anglophone society has on the psyche of a sinophone
individual. In decrying the marginalisation of the Chinese-educated and
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Chinese-speaking in Singapore society, the protagonist sets out on an

almost self-derogatory discourse about the ‘uselessness’ of the Chinese
language in the face of the dominance of the English language. In the fol-
lowing extract, the protagonist describes how he is severely handicapped in
his career by his lack of proficiency in English, and how he compromises his
Chinese identity by compelling himself to improve his standard of English.
Source Text
……他都不知道自己为何会选读中文系的。可能是因为英文不好生性懒
散，以为中文系最容易混的缘故。没想到，这一系，除了教华文外，真
的如某位要人所说的，是最没用的一系。毕业后，他的第一份工作是在
海港局当个小执行官。那儿的同事，几乎都是英校生。因为英语的表达
能力不好，他这个南大生，就象活在白人社会里的有色人一样，显得既
低能又笨拙。为了不想受人歧视（其实他很清楚，他上班不久，同事们
就开始看不起他了），他每天都得战战兢兢，忙着搞他的蹩脚英文。为
了强迫自己多接触英文，他甚至连中文报纸都不看了；那里还有闲情去
记那些毫无用处的诗云子曰？
Translated Text
… He does not even know why he chose to major in Chinese Studies in the first
place. Maybe it was due to his poor English and his lazy nature. He thought Chinese
would be the easiest subject to muddle through. He never expected that the Chinese
Department, besides training teachers of Chinese, is really the most useless depart-
ment, just as someone prominent once said.
After graduation, his first job was a junior executive post in PSA. Almost all his col-
leagues had graduated from English-medium schools. Because he could not express
himself well in English he, a Nantah graduate, felt like a coloured living in a white
society. It made him seem both imbecilic and clumsy. Not wanting to be discrimi-
nated against (and he knew very well that his colleagues began to look down on
him not long after he started work), everyday was a battle getting by gingerly with
his shoddy English.
To force himself to have more contact with English, he even stopped reading Chinese
newspapers; so when would he have the leisure time to think about those useless
poems?
In this passage, the protagonist, who is representative of the core ethnic
Chinese community in Singapore by virtue of his distinctively Chinese-
language education, first expresses regret at having chosen to major in
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Chinese Studies in ‘the most useless department’ in the university. Here

‘Nantah’ is the symbolic seat of Chinese language and culture in Singapore
as a Chinese-based university. Subsequently, we are told how his incapacity
in the English language becomes his source of anguish in his workplace.
In his bid to blend himself into his English-speaking work environment,
the protagonist attempts to ‘have more contact with English’ to the extent
that he has no time for reading Chinese newspapers and for writing ‘use-
less’ Chinese poems. The protagonist seemingly takes on the ideological
position of an English-educated/anglophone Singaporean by perceiving
his own Chineseness not as the identity of Self but as that of Other. In
other words, the protagonist marginalises himself in a rhetorical stance to
articulate the identity crisis experienced by the protagonist and by the core
ethnic Chinese community in Singapore that he represents. The cultural
anguish experienced by the protagonist stems from this apparent conf lict
of ideological positions. Indeed, the Chinese-speaking protagonist does
not actually desire to see himself as an Other; he feels he is forced by social
circumstances to despise his own Chineseness and to instead identify him-
self with the language of the English Other.
What literary ef fect does this identity conf lict have on the reader
of the ST? Since the novel was originally written for predominantly
Chinese-speaking readers, the author would have expected his read-
ers to empathise with the emotional pain felt by the Chinese-speaking
protagonist in the tension between his Chineseness and the English-
speaking society writ large. In other words, the identity meaning of the
original novel is contingent upon the reader’s cultural af filiation with
Chinese language and culture. To the author and reader of the original
novel, university Chinese departments and Chinese poems are not really
‘useless’; they are perceived as ‘useless’ only in the context of the margin-
alised position of Chinese language and culture under the hegemony of
English, and this recognition of the uselessness of Chinese is intended
to induce cultural distress.
Now, consider how the passage cited above should be interpreted by
an English-speaking Chinese Singaporean reader of the translated version
who does not hold the same cultural position as the protagonist/author
and who, in fact, is a representative of the marginalising (as opposed to
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the marginalised) community in the story. To the intended readers of the
translation, who we have established as predominantly anglophone Chinese
Singaporeans, the plight of the linguistically disadvantaged sinophone pro-
tagonist potentially reinforces their ideological assumption that English
is the language of practical value and social power. University Chinese
departments and Chinese poems are literally ‘useless’ in their context of
interpretation, not least because these entities are irrelevant to their imme-
diate cultural experience.
The central issue is that the reader of the translation does not have
access to the socio-cultural context from which meaning is derived by the
predominantly sinophone reader of the ST. Once again, this cannot be
treated simply as a matter of cultural dif ference; it reveals a deeper and
more abstract identity conf lict involved in the interpretation of the trans-
lated text. The reader of the translation is a member of the anglophone
community who play the role of the cultural Other – the perceived source
of the protagonist’s identity crisis in the ST. The irony is that in order for
dynamic equivalence to be achieved, TT readers will literally have to aban-
don their own identity and stand on the same side of the equation as the
protagonist to truly understand the marginalised status of Chinese-speaking
Chinese Singaporeans. This inevitably creates an epistemological dilemma,
as these anglophone readers would then have to understand themselves as
a cultural Other in their own language. In reading the English translation,
then, the anglophone Chinese Singaporean readers of the translated text
potentially confront two irreconcilable positions: should they identify with
the Chinese-speaking ‘Them’, or the English-speaking ‘We’? Even more
critically, should the Chinese-speaking Other still be read as an Other, or
should the English-speaking Self be read as an Other instead?
The characterisation of the protagonist in Guji de lian contains such
intense Chineseness that certain segments of the text resist translation into
English without burdening the TT reader with lengthy footnotes. This is
evident from the fact that the novel is replete with technical literary jargon
that eludes readers from an exclusively English-speaking background. Take
the following extract for instance:
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96 Chapter 3
Source Text
父亲虽然是个落魄书生，毕竟还是把他养大了，而且还供他读完大学。
他这没出息的大学生，对父亲的回报是什么呢？他甚至还瞧不起他呢。
因为他在南大念的是中文系，受过正规的学员教育，所以自认对国学与
文学的认识都比父亲好。他看过父亲发表在报章上的文章与旧体诗，觉
得都是些毫无新意的陈腔滥调。例如论王国维的境界、李义山的燕台四
首之类……至于那些五言、七言，不外都是些怀才不遇的感慨。他最不
能接受的是父亲在诗里用的词汇：秋雨啦、清樽啦、玉漏啦、剪烛啦，
读起来虚假得很，根本不象是现代新加坡人写的。老实说，他对现代人
（尤其是本地人）写的旧体诗，都没什么好感。因为他认为，五四运动
到现在已经六十多年了，用华文写作的人，实在不应再搞这些背时的东
西。现代人写旧体诗，不但酸腐，而且矫情。
Translated Text
Although Father was a scholar in dire straits, he did manage to bring him up and
even saw him through University. And how did he, a good-for-nothing graduate,
repay Father? He looked down on Father. All because he chose to study Chinese
at Nantah, because he received a proper education, he felt superior to Father in
terms of learning. He had seen the articles and classical poems Father published in
magazines, and felt they were uncreative clichés. Take the subject of Wang Guowei’s
concept of ‘literary heights’ or Li Yishan’s four ‘Yan Tai’ poems for example … As for
the five-syllable and seven-syllable regulated verse Father wrote, they were merely
the grumbling of an ‘unappreciated scholar.’ What he could stand the least was the
vocabulary Father used in his poetry: autumn rain, crystal cup, jade hour glass, trim-
ming the candlewick; they all sounded sham. They just did not sound like what a
modern Singaporean would write. Frankly speaking, he did not have a good opin-
ion of modern people (especially locals) who wrote classical poetry. He felt that the
May Fourth Movement was something which had happened over sixty years ago,
and Chinese writers should really quit writing stuf f such as classical poetry which
was hopelessly outdated. Modern writing classical poetry not only seemed pedantic,
but also af fectedly conventional.
The author has apparently presumed that the ST reader is equipped with at
least some general knowledge of Chinese literature, as can be seen from the
traditional poetic images cited in the above passage – the autumn rain, crys-
tal cup, jade hour glass, trimming the candlewick. Despite the fact that the
subject matter at hand is extremely technical, no footnotes are provided in
the above English translation. How is the English-speaking Chinese reader
supposed to appreciate what ‘Yan Tai’ poems are? What do ‘five-syllable
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and seven-syllable regulated verse’ actually mean to an English-speaking

reader with limited or no knowledge of classical Chinese literature?
What is interesting about the above passage is that it reveals an inter-
nal conf lict between two generations of Chinese scholars. The protagonist
expresses disapproval towards his father for the ‘clichés’ and ‘sham’ in his
writing. But this is only meaningful to the extent that the reader under-
stands what ‘cliché’ and ‘sham’ in Chinese literary writing actually are in
the first place, and the author expects the Chinese-speaking reader of the
ST to possess at least some such knowledge. Readers of the English trans-
lation, however, cannot be assumed to possess knowledge of this kind as
they fall outside the cultural experiential context of the author and ST
reader. The protagonist’s demeaning attitude towards his father’s literary
writing therefore cannot be equally meaningful to the TT reader. Indeed,
what is supposed to be ‘cliché’ and ‘sham’ to the ST reader will appear to
be totally foreign to the TT reader.
This use of highly technical jargon shows that the author is targeting
his work at members of the sinophone community who share the same
cultural experience as the Chinese-speaking protagonist. The intention
is to induce in such readers the cultural agony experienced by sinophone
Chinese Singaporeans under the perceived oppression of an anglophone
Other. Meaning is generated through the evocation of a common cultural
experience, based on the assumption that the cultural identity of the ST
reader is reasonably well-aligned with that of the author.
The English translation of the novel is hence problematic from an
epistemological point of view, not least because the linguistic/cultural
experience of the TT readers is opposed to that of the ST readers. But that
is exactly the point of translating the Chinese novel into English in the first
place, for if common experience were to pre-exist between the two groups
of readers, the act of translation would have been redundant. Recall that
the primary objective of translating these samples of Singapore Chinese
literature into English is to allow the non-Chinese-speaking community
(including the English-speaking Chinese community) to understand ‘how
Chinese-speaking Chinese Singaporeans felt (and, in many cases, still
feel) about the changing nature of Singaporean society’ (St André 2001:
15). With reference to this objective, I propose that the act of translating
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98 Chapter 3
Guji de lian into The Lonely Face creates an interpretive dilemma. How
should the anglophone Chinese Singaporean reader of the translated text
respond to the Chinese identity crisis espoused in the Chinese novel when
s/he represents the cultural Other who is seen to perpetuate such crisis
in the original text? Should the TT reader identify himself/herself with
the Chinese-speaking protagonist and critique the hegemony of English
language and culture, in which case s/he would end up in an act of self-
Othering? Or should this reader adhere to his/her identity and interpret
the translated text from the perspective of an English-speaking Chinese
Singaporean, in which case the whole point of translating the novel into
English would be lost?
The epistemological dilemma and its implications for

translation
The case examples cited in the preceding discussion, as well as those in

the previous chapter, are exemplary of what I have termed the ‘motif of
loss’ in Singapore Chinese literature. Under this thematic category fall a
considerable corpus of works, all of which are concerned with the fate of
the Chinese language and culture in Singapore. Due to the centrality of
Chinese identity consciousness in these works, they serve as optimal test
cases for the exploration of how translation creates epistemological prob-
lems for the reader.
This chapter has applied Berman’s (1984/1992, 1985/2004) theory of
translational ethics – initially formulated for the analysis of translation
strategies – on a study of strategies in reading translations. Projecting a
hypothetical readership, I have advanced two scenarios that potentially arise
in the reception of Chinese identity in English translation. Each position
is untenable in its own way. In the first scenario, an anglophone reader is
assimilated, at an ideological level, by the ‘We’ identity in the ST. Here the
act of reading cannot but generate a self-othering discourse: the anglophone
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Self has to become a discursive Other in order for the reader of the trans-
lated text to obtain identification with the ‘Chineseness’ projected in the
text. In the second scenario, the anglophone reader decides to resist such
assimilation. In this case, s/he carries an anglophone Self throughout the
reading process, hence the sinophone Other will always remain the Other.
This then raises the issue of how and to what extent cross-cultural literary
communication is possible in the case where the cultural identity of the
target reader is deeply implicated in the text itself. Notwithstanding the
translatability of a Chinese text, the anglophone reader ultimately needs
to confront the question of who the Self and Other are in his/her reading
experience.
A comparative case can be found in the Chinese translation of Virginia
Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse, in particular with respect to the character Lily
Briscoe, whose ‘Chinese eyes’ are perceived to be a negative trait – one
that presumably reduces her chances of getting married. Chan (2010: 38)
maintains that ‘the reader’s empathetic identification with a character can
be diminished when attention is drawn to an unpleasant feature of some-
one in the reader’s ethnic group’.5 In other words, when the identity of
the reader of a translated text is being ‘othered’ in the fictional discourse
in question, problems concerning reception will arise:
That a Chinese reader might back of f from sympathetic identification on coming
to these points in the novel because Lily’s ‘Chinese eyes’ are said to be the main
obstacle to her finding a husband alerts us to a more general problem concerning
the emotional response of readers to the Other. (ibid.)
Just as references to Lily Briscoe’s ‘Chinese eyes’ may alienate the Chinese
reader of Woolf ’s novel (Chan 2010: 39), so the anglophone Chinese
Singaporean reader may encounter problems in seeking empathetic iden-
tification with anglophone characters, who are invariably cast as the nega-
tive Other in Chinese literary works that exploit the ‘motif of loss’. These
problems underlie the dialectic between the two possible reading positions
I have advanced in this chapter. Indeed, the two positions are analogical
5 See Keen (2006) for an application of the concept of empathy in narrative analysis.
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100 Chapter 3
to Venuti’s dichotomous model on how cultural texts may be treated in

translation. From the perspective of translation strategies, a translator may
choose to either domesticate foreign elements in a ST or highlight the alter-
ity of the foreign by resisting assimilation by the conventions of the target
language and culture. Shifting our focus from the translator to the reader,
we may hypothesise that a reader can interpret a translated text in two ways.
On the one hand, the reader may ‘domesticate’; that is, to instantiate an
ethnocentric reading stance, which ‘brings back’ the cultural Other (in our
case, sinophone Chinese Singaporeans) as ‘the recognizable, the familiar
even the same’ (Venuti 2008a: 14). This then becomes an interpretive, as
opposed to a textual, form of domestication. Here the readers of a transla-
tion, rather than the translator, enact violence on the ST by interpreting
the dif ferences of the foreign text within their own ideological framework,
thus reversing the indexicalities that subsist in the original text. Through
this reading strategy, the cultural Other does not emerge in its own terms;
rather, ‘[w]hatever dif ference the translation conveys is now imprinted
by the receiving culture, assimilated to its positions of intelligibility, its
canons and taboos, its codes and ideologies’ (ibid.). On the other hand, the
reader may choose to foreignise or defamiliarise his/her reading experience
by projecting himself/herself as Other. As discussed earlier, though this
reading position would allow the sinophone Other to emerge in its own
terms without the adulteration of anglophone identity consciousness, it
irredeemably leads to a discursive ‘othering’ of the self.
My reading of Singapore Chinese literature in translation might be
seen as deconstructive in some sense, insofar as two conf licting facets of a
text are revealed to expose a certain contradiction and hence instability in
meaning. Two dif ferences, however, are notable. One is that while decon-
struction works from rhetorical elements residing within the text, my focus
is on the reader’s interpretation, which essentially operates outside the text.
The other dif ference is that while deconstruction deals with instability in
respect to signification, my concern lies with the instability associated with
the cultural function of translation, that is, the extent to which anglophone
Chinese readers can appreciate the Chinese identity crisis by subscribing to
a sinophilic consciousness. I have hence proposed that an epistemological
dilemma exists in the reception of translated literature that espouses a strong
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Chineseness: the reader of the translation either sinks into self-denial, or
otherwise compromises the purpose of translating the text.
The immediate question would then be whether some kind of middle
ground can be negotiated, the possibility of which I do not foreclose. One
might argue, for instance, that our anglophone Chinese readers may feel
a degree of empathy for and hence identification with the point of view
embraced in the original Chinese stories, especially since the physical and
cultural world evoked in these stories is familiar to readers of both the
originals and the translations – Chinese Singaporeans in both cases. This
would mean that, insofar as the TT readers are drawn into the stories,
the two reading positions are not necessarily irreconcilable. Having said
that, one needs to be reminded that we are not dealing with TT readers
who are external to and therefore detached from the ST and its associated
socio-historical context. A British or American reader who happens to be
interested in Singapore Chinese literature and who accesses it through
its English translations would be a ‘detached’ reader. The specific target
readership on which this chapter focuses prompts critical ref lection with
regards the plausibility of adhering to the cultural assumptions of Self while
fully embracing those of the Other, when the former is fully implicated
in the ideological thrust of the ST. In this situation, the attempt at iden-
tification with the cultural Other is made challenging, if not quite unten-
able, given that the Self of the anglophone Chinese reader is not a neutral
entity standing outside the ideological frame of the ST. Rather, this Self
is entrenched in the ST as the Other, involved in the story as a hegemonic
identity in opposition to a marginalised identity that the author of the
Chinese text so cherishes.
The epistemological dilemma outlined in this chapter has implications
for rethinking the ‘bridging’ function that translation is too often assumed
to play in intercultural communication. Consider, for instance, the bridg-
ing function underlying the line ‘we hope that reading these stories, essays,
and poems will provide the opportunity to learn how Chinese-speaking
Chinese in Singapore felt […] about the changing nature of Singaporean
society’ (St André 2001: 15). The potential impasse faced by anglophone
Chinese readers in their interpretation of identity illustrates how the cul-
tural Self of TT readers may interfere with their reception of the cultural
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102 Chapter 3
Other in translation, and possibly compromise the purpose of the transla-
tion. How can cultural identities then be negotiated in translation when
Self and Other are mutually implicated?
The question, fundamentally philosophical in nature, might require
a philosophical resolution. For this, we might seek recourse to Derrida
(1989/1991), who dealt extensively with the subject of the Subject. My pre-
ceding discussion is based on the assumption – an assumption reinforced
by the works collected in Droplets – that the Self and Other are singular
and mutually exclusive entities. What if, from the very start, we entertain
the idea that Self and Other cannot exist as concepts in their own right
without the opposite other? Derrida (ibid.: 100–1) professed that ‘[t]he
singularity of the “who” is not the individuality of a thing that would be
identical to itself, it is not an atom. It is a singularity that dislocates or
divides itself in gathering itself together to answer to the other’. In other
words, the identity of a subject is not atomic in its constitution; its exist-
ence is premised on what it excludes in its own definition. Expounding on
Derrida’s ideas, Davis (2001: 91) explains that:
the ‘subject’ of writing (such as a translator or author) does not exist as a sovereign
solitude, a pure singularity that deals with others or with texts fully separate from
him or herself. Rather, this ‘subject’ becomes as a relation to systems of dif ference,
which make thinking meaning and ‘self ’ possible in the first place. The ‘subject’, then,
participates in generality. In order to think of ourselves as discrete and singular, we
must draw boundaries that exclude what we are not. That which is excluded in the
constitution of the ‘self ’ is, of necessity, both ‘wholly other’ to the self and the con-
dition of the self ’s identity.
If, like the ‘subject’ of writing, the ‘subject’ of reading (i.e. the reader) ‘does
not exist as a sovereign solitude’, ‘a pure singularity’ self-suf ficient in itself,
are we able to resolve the conf lict between Self and Other in the reading
of a translated text? After all, ‘sinophone Chinese Singaporean readers’
becomes a meaningful designation only in juxtaposition with ‘anglophone
Chinese Singaporean readers’; the two groups dif fer as much as they con-
stitute each other. That being said, the epistemological dilemma described
in this chapter manifests itself as a practical reading problem, one that
cannot be overcome by simply recognising the mutual implications of ‘We’
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and ‘They’. Thus, while we can, at a philosophical level, state that since the
Self of the reader always already constitutes its Other, and therefore that
the act of reading the Other is at the same time the act of reading the Self,
the reader nonetheless needs to make an ideological stand in reading the
translated text. No reader/reading is ever neutral – nor is that necessarily
desirable, indeed. Rather than attempt at a resolution, we might do better
to let the dilemma stand as it is. Let it stand as a monument in the reading
of translations, a constant reminder to the reader that every act of reading
is ideological. Only by confronting the dilemma for what it is can readers
become more conscious of the frameworks underpinning their interpreta-
tion of identity in translation. Such consciousness is always valuable in the
critical appreciation of the literary arts.
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Chapter 4
Translation and Language Power Relations in

Heterolingual Anthologies of Literature
Literary anthologies, polysystem studies, literary exchanges
Literary anthologies belong to a category of discourse known as ‘configu-

rated corpora’, defined as a corpora ‘whose constituent elements stand in
some relation to each other either in space (in a book, or an exhibition hall,
for example) or in time (in a series of books or performances)’; it is a col-
lectivity whose meaning and value are ‘greater than the sum of meanings
and values of the individual items taken in isolation’ (Frank 1998/2001:
13). Analogically, anthologies and museums perform the same function.
The literary anthology ‘can do for texts what museums do for artefacts
and other objects considered of cultural importance: preserve and exhibit
them and, by selecting and arranging the exhibits, project an interpreta-
tion of a given field, make relations and values visible, maybe educate taste’
(Essmann and Frank 1991: 66). In other words, it is essentially ideological
in its selection of textual material to portray a certain image of a literature
or group of literatures.
Anthologies of translated literature are a branch of literary antholo-
gies that serve as a ‘paradigmatic medium’ of literary transfer (Frank and
Essmann 1990). The heterolingual literary anthology is fundamentally one
that exists by virtue of translation. As we shall see later, even in the case
where works written in dif ferent languages are merely juxtaposed in their
original languages, translation still exerts a presence – in the incarnation
of non-translation. In most cases, however, some kind of interlingual activ-
ity will transpire in the making of such an anthology, be it overt – where
both source and translated texts appear – or latent, where source texts are
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106 Chapter 4
absent. As translation is central to the existence of a heterolingual literary

anthology, the latter provides a rich empirical source from which hypoth-
eses about language relations can be made.
A heterolingual anthology of literature is one that involves more than
one language; this does not, however, mean that the anthology itself neces-
sarily contains more than one language. Take, for example, an anthology
that comprises literary pieces translated from a certain source to a certain
target language, and wherein only the translated texts appear. In this case,
the publication is prima facie monolingual, since readers come into contact
with only the target language; it is de facto heterolingual, as there is one
other language (i.e. the source language) that is suppressed but is no doubt
in presence, albeit perhaps as a shadow in the translational relationship.
Thus, our working definition of what constitutes ‘heterolingualism’ dif fers
slightly from that proposed by Grutman (2006), who uses the term to refer
to the co-presence of typologically dif ferent languages within a work. A
publication is henceforth considered heterolingual insofar as translation
is involved in its production, which means, by implication, that more than
one language is entailed in its making.
The heterolingual literary anthology is a discursive site through which
we can observe language power relations in a plurilingual society as well as
changes in such relations over time. Within this type of anthology, transla-
tion serves as a mechanism in the negotiation of symbolic capital among
various languages, and becomes an ideological site where languages struggle
for visibility and prestige. In a struggle of this kind, languages engage one
another in exchanges, either asymmetric or symmetric, in an attempt to
move towards the centre of the sociolinguistic polysystem, or otherwise
consolidate their central position in the polysystem by relegating competing
languages to the periphery. Drawing on Even-Zohar’s (1990, 2005/2010)
polysystem theory and Casanova’s (1999/2004) conception of literary
translation as unequal linguistic exchanges, one may thus propose that
complex sociolinguistic transactions underlie the making of a heterolin-
gual literary anthology, and that such transactions may be described and
explained by means of conceptual models.
The type of anthology that is of interest to us here is that of national, spe-
cifically Singaporean, literature. Specifically, we are looking at heterolingual
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Translation and Language Power Relations 107
anthologies that purport to represent the literatures of a multilingual soci-

ety. As the languages in such a society command varying degrees of sym-
bolic capital or symbolic power (Bourdieu 1991), they exist in a hierarchical
relationship. In the terms of polysystem theory (Even Zohar 1990), one or
more languages are at the centre of the sociolinguistic polysystem, while
others are at the periphery (or, conceivably, at some point between centre
and periphery). The sociolinguistic polysystem is not stagnant. Although
the various languages in the system are necessarily hierarchised, they engage
each other in a dynamic relationship by negotiating their relative positions
within it.1 The various players within this polysystem compete with each
other for the central position and, through such interaction, bring about
an evolution in the system.
Thus, in a multilingual society, we have, in most cases, a dominating or
hegemonic (H) language (H-language) and one or more dominated or non-
hegemonic (non-H) languages. By definition, an H-language has higher
visibility and symbolic capital than a non-H language in a given multicul-
tural context. The tension between H- and non-H languages stands in high
relief in a translational relationship. Following the Bourdieun (1991) socio-
logical tradition, translation may be conceptualised as a form of economic
transaction; as with any type of economic exchange, an act of translation
involves capital, in this case, primarily symbolic capital or symbolic power.
Focusing on literary exchanges in a global context, Casanova (1999/2004)
argues that literary translation is more than a neutral linguistic act in which
the literature written in one language is translated into another. It is rather
fraught with language power struggles. Thus, the process of translation is
one of littérisation, whereby literatures written in non-H-languages tend
to be translated into H-languages in order to increase their visibility and
1 Each language in turn constitutes a polysystem in its own right. For instance, while
Chinese is at the periphery of the larger sociolinguistic polysystem in Singapore,
within the Chinese language polysystem, Mandarin Chinese is at the centre while
Chinese dialects are at various points at the periphery. Yet on another level, dialects
operate within their own polysystem in Singapore, with those commanding a larger
number of speakers, such as Hokkien, Teochew and Cantonese, being at the centre
of the Chinese dialect polysystem.
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108 Chapter 4
symbolic capital in the ‘world republic of letters’ (ibid.: 136), which in
turn can translate into economic capital (e.g. royalties). As ‘the major prize
and weapon in literary competition’ (ibid.: 133), literary translation is not
merely an act of inter- and/or cross-cultural communication, ‘the passage
from one language to another’ (ibid.: 135); it is a discursive site where
power relations among languages are negotiated and played out. I would
contend that nowhere is this more obvious than in heterolingual literary
anthologies, where the presence/absence as well as direction of transla-
tion provides us with insights into how languages relate to one another in
a multilingual society.
Voice, visibility and the significance of translation in

anthologies
The heterolingual literary anthology is a powerful instrument with which

we can gauge the power relations among various languages in a multilingual
society. In this regard, two parameters serve as qualitative measures of the
symbolic capital possessed by a certain language: visibility and voice. A
language is accorded visibility when it appears in a heterolingual anthology,
either as the source or the target language or both. Invisibility thus obtains
when a language reincarnates in the physical body of another language and
does not appear in its original medium; in other words, it does not exist
for itself. The ‘voice’ of a language, on the other hand, is its ability to ‘speak’
in itself. In the context of a heterolingual anthology, a language ‘speaks’
when it translates (another language), or otherwise exists untranslated in
its original language. The ability to translate other languages is thus the
ability to speak on behalf of other languages. Conversely, a tendency to
be translated rather than to translate indicates a language’s incapacity to
lend voice to another language. This incapacity to ‘speak’ points to a lack
of symbolic power and possibly an identity crisis in the language. This
happens when, for instance, translation is unidirectional, typically from a
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non-H-language into an H-language. The direction of translation is thus

an important aspect of discursive relationships, especially in multilingual
societies, as it has implications for our understanding of language power.
A language that at once possesses voice and visibility is at the centre
of the polysystem, while a language that possesses neither of these proper-
ties is at the periphery. Thus, if a language serves as a translated language
only, and is suppressed in a heterolingual anthology (where source texts
are sometimes absent), it is weaker vis-á-vis the language that translates
it and is visible in the publication. Obviously, the two properties do not
always co-occur. It is completely possible for a language to obtain visibility
(by virtue of its very presence in the anthology) but not voice (i.e. it serves
only as a translated language), as we have seen above.
In the making of a heterolingual anthology, translation is a central
mechanism. It constructs, moderates and negotiates language power rela-
tions by af fording or depriving languages and their literatures of certain
discursive properties, among which voice and visibility are prominent.
The translational perspective throws light on the ideological constitution
of an anthology by revealing the asymmetricities at work, thus enabling us
to hypothesize on the state of language relations synchronically in a given
linguistic community. It also allows us to trace the changes in such relations
diachronically. For instance, a corpus of literary anthologies published over
decades could of fer insight into the dynamic nature of language relations
in a specific sociolinguistic context. Such an enterprise is relatively new in
the f ledgling field of translation studies and may be profitably pursued in
the form of case studies, with the view to developing universal norms.
Paratexts and positionality
Paratexts, as defined by Genette (1987/1997), include a whole range of

discursive material surrounding a text proper, including, among others,
the book’s title, table of contents, preface, introduction and formatting
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110 Chapter 4
(see also Pym 1998: 62–5). Paratexts locate a publication within a specific
presentational frame, which in turn inf luences its reception. The function
of paratexts, according to Genette (1987/1997: 1; emphasis in original),
is ‘to present it [the work], in the usual sense of this verb but also in the
strongest sense: to make present, to ensure the text’s presence in the world,
its “reception” and consumption in the form […] of a book’. Indeed, it is
the paratext that shapes the text it accompanies in a way that is desired by
its author and/or publisher:
It is an ‘undefined zone’ between the inside and the outside, a zone without any hard
and fast boundary on either the inward side (turned toward the text) or the outward
side (turned toward the world’s discourse about the text) […] [It is] always the con-
veyor of a commentary that is authorial or more or less legitimated by the author
[…] [It constitutes] a zone not only of transition but also of transaction: a privileged
place of a pragmatics and a strategy, of an inf luence on the public, an inf luence that
[…] is at the service of a better reception for the text and a more pertinent reading
of it (more pertinent, of course, in the eyes of the author and his allies). (ibid.: 2;
emphasis in original)
The present chapter surveys twelve heterolingual anthologies published in

Singapore over a 23-year period. The anthologies have dif ferent contexts
of publication, but commonly invoke multiculturalism in their discursive
performance of a national culture. As mentioned earlier, heterolingualism
is not taken to mean the actual existence of more than one language in any
given anthology. The anthologies are considered heterolingual to the extent
that they bring together a group of literary works originally written in the
four of ficial languages of Singapore, whether or not the source and target
languages co-appear in the publication. The chapter uses paratexts as data
in the analysis of the ideological function of translation in heterolingual
anthologies, with a focus on the editors’ introductions and prefaces, choice
of translating and translated languages as well as presentation of source and
target texts in the selected publications. My objective is to elicit ideological
patterns that emerge from these works and to attempt an explanation of
these patterns by drawing on sociological theories of translation. In focus is
how paratextual sites in anthologies become ‘zones of transaction’ between
languages, in which editors employ paratextual strategies to privilege certain
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languages and subordinate others, so as to exert ‘an inf luence on the public’

with respect to the symbolic values accorded to various languages.
A guiding theme of this chapter is that of positionality. In the language
ideological context of Ireland, Cronin (2011: 117) defines positionality in
translation as:
not simply a question of who does the translation but where it appears and what
linguistic company it keeps. Printing original source poems alongside the translations
implies a dif ferent potential readership from a collection where only the transla-
tions appear. Firstly, in the imagined space of audience, the implication is that there
may be a collection of readers who have a knowledge of both languages but whose
mastery of one (inevitably English) is superior to the other. Secondly, and this is an
alternative view, the dual-language editions recognize that competent Irish-language
literacy is indeed extremely restricted and such editions preserve the integrity of the
original while allowing for larger national and international readerships. This is a
translational variation on the co-existence of two solitudes. Thirdly […] the trans-
lation space of the dual edition may represent a kind of laboratory for the working
out of new language realities in Ireland.
The following sections will examine heterolingual literary anthologies,

with emphasis on their positionality in translation, and the implications
for the kind of power relations at play among the languages involved. I am
concerned with the ‘linguistic company’ that is figured in anthologies, how
anthologies attempt to ‘preserve the integrity of the original’ (or otherwise
disregard such integrity) and how anthologies both ref lect and participate
in the ‘working out of new language realities’ in multilingual Singapore.
Anthology of ASEAN Literatures: The Poetry of Singapore
This poetry anthology (Thumboo et al. 1985), published in Singapore under

the sponsorship of the ASEAN Committee on Culture and Information,
is part of the Anthology of ASEAN Literature series, conceived as ‘a sys-
tematic study of the national literature of the member countries’ (ibid.:
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112 Chapter 4
n.p.). The Poetry of Singapore is significant in that it is the first anthology
of literary works written in Singapore’s four of ficial languages, with the
titles arranged in the order of Malay, Tamil, Chinese and English. Malay
language poems head the anthology for political reasons: it is the national
language of Singapore, even though it does not possess lingua franca status.
The original works in the first three language categories (the mother tongue
languages) are followed by their English translations, while original English
pieces appear as they are without translations into any other language.
Credits are not given to translators at the end of the English translations
of non-English works.
In his introduction to the volume, the general editor explains the
rationale for a multilingual representation of Singapore literature and
the translation of mother tongue literatures into English. Multilingual
representation (of literature in our case) ref lects Singapore’s multiracial
origins, a common discursive practice that is central to the construction of
the city-state’s multicultural image. What, then, justifies the translation of
all non-English works into English (but not vice-versa)? This supposedly
fulfils ‘the imperative to develop skills and capacities – best realised through
English – essential to the viability of a small modern republic’ (Thumboo
et al. 1985: 1; my emphasis). In other words, translation is perceived as a
functional and pragmatic means for technical development, as opposed
to a channel for cultural communication and understanding. The editor
further explains the functional divide between the English language and
the mother tongue languages:
Put brief ly, the mother tongue provides social and cultural ballast and ensures the
continuity of core traditional values while English performs a number of interlocking
roles as the primary language of formal education. In addition to being increasingly
the chief linguistic bridge between Singaporeans, English, already the language of
international and regional contact, is crucial to training manpower for the finan-
cial, industrial, technological, information and service sectors which make up the
economy of Singapore. (ibid.)
Here the anthology demonstrates a language ideological stance that fully

agrees with the prevailing discourse on the polarisation of language func-
tions at the time of publication (see Chapter 1, ‘The sociolinguistics of
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Singapore, with special emphasis on the relation between English and

Chinese’). It is a reinforcement of the ‘economic versus cultural’ dichotomy
between English and the mother tongue languages. One could argue, in
line with Cronin (2011: 117), that the fact that non-English texts appear in
their original languages (and, indeed, precede their English translations),
means there is an intention to ‘preserve the integrity of the original while
allowing for larger national and international readerships’. This could well
be true, but the editorial decision to make English the only target language
also enables it to become much more visible in the anthology than the
other three languages. This is simply because each piece of work written
in a mother tongue language has to be translated into English. Crucially,
the reverse does not take place: the mother tongue languages serve only
as source languages – they are translated out of but not into.
This mono-directionality in translation suggests that English alone
has the capacity to represent and disseminate literatures written in the
other languages, with the implication that Singapore literature is ‘best
realised through English’ (Thumboo et al. 1985: 1). According to Casanova
(1999/2004: 135), when literatures from dominated languages are translated
into dominating languages, translation serves as ‘a means of annexation,
of diverting peripheral works and adding them to the stock of central
resources’ for the dominating languages. For the dominated languages,
this becomes a form of ‘consecration’, of receiving the ‘certificate of literary
standing’ and a means through which dominated literatures are catapulted
into visibility and existence in the literary universe (ibid.). The translation
of Chinese, Malay and Tamil literatures into English may indeed serve to
‘consecrate’ them in a sense and propagate them into a wider readership.
At the same time, however, the translating-translated relationship that
exists between English and the mother tongue languages also constructs
an unbalanced power relationship between them. This imbalance is mani-
fested in the mono-directionality of translation in The Poetry of Singapore,
a conscious textual move justified by the editor through tapping into the
discourse of multiculturalism. I would thus argue that as translation pushes
literatures written in the mother tongue languages towards the centre of
the literary scene, it simultaneously underscores their marginality in the
sociolinguistic polysystem of Singapore.
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114 Chapter 4
Anthology of ASEAN Literatures: The Fiction of Singapore
This anthology of short fiction (Thumboo et al. 1990b) is published as

part of the Anthology of ASEAN Literatures series and is therefore the
sister volume of The Poetry of Singapore. One interesting aspect about
this publication is that its single-volume reprint version in 1993 portrays
a dif ferent literary and multicultural image from its two-volume parent
anthology published in 1990. The 1990 anthology adopts the same stance
as The Poetry of Singapore with regard to translation: while works of English
fiction appear in their original language, those written in Chinese, Malay
and Tamil are translated into English and placed alongside their originals.
The texts are similarly sequenced in the order Malay, Tamil, Chinese and
English. As before, the justification for translating into English is provided
by the editor in the general introduction (Thumboo et al. 1990b: I; my
emphasis):
Works written in Chinese, Malay and Tamil are translated into English, whose posi-
tion as a pivotal, bridge language, has strengthened since 1985 when Volume I, The
Poetry of Singapore, appeared. That is fact, not sentiment […] As more Singaporeans
use it with confidence and sophistication, a greater portion of the Singaporean’s
experience will be explored and captured through English.
The justification provided here resonates with that given in The Poetry of
Singapore (cf. ‘explored and captured through English’ with the earlier ‘best
realized through English’). As with all metaphors of translation, the ‘bridge’
and ‘pivot’ metaphors are ideological; they express ways of thinking about
language and translation.2 In this particular context, the metaphors con-
struct English as the nexus among the four of ficial languages in Singapore.
A close reading of this passage also reveals the anthology’s ideologi-
cal bearing on languages and how certain groups of language users are
2 See St André (2010) for studies on how translation is metaphorically constructed

in discourse and what dif ferent metaphors reveal about the ways in which we think
about translation.
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excluded from its construction of the so-called ‘Singaporean’s experi-

ence’. The motivation to translate into English apparently comes from the
‘fact’ (‘not sentiment’, as it is emphasised) that ‘more Singaporeans use it
[English] with confidence and sophistication’. This immediately excludes
Singaporeans who are much more proficient in their respective mother
tongues than in English, and there would have been a considerable number
of such predominantly Chinese, Malay and Tamil speakers in 1990. The
earlier ‘fact’ also leads logically to the lingua-centric assertion that ‘a greater
portion of the Singaporean’s experience will be explored and captured
through English’, which essentially links cognitive experience to linguis-
tic experience. It establishes – in declarative form, further accentuated by
the modality expressed in will be – English as the language defining the
Singaporean’s experience, thus relegating the mother tongue languages to
the periphery of that experience. The construction of the ‘Singaporean’s
experience’ is clearly inf lected with language values here. What, then, do
we make of the experience that is peculiar to the three ethnic communities
in Singapore? Do these disparate experiences have a voice of their own, or
are they to be subsumed into and represented by – through the mediation
of translation – a unified voice embodied in English? With a metonymic
turn, the editor has accorded English the right to stand for a broader and
more complex sociolinguistic reality.
As with The Poetry of Singapore, the asymmetric power relationship
evident in the paratext is manifested in The Fiction of Singapore in the
directionality of translation: works written in English exist independently
of any translation, while works written in the other languages ‘pivot’ on
English as the single translating language. English represents, and there-
fore it translates. This is further perpetuated in the 1993 reprint version, a
shortened one based on the 1990 anthology. It includes only the fictional
texts written originally in English and English translations of the Malay,
Chinese and Tamil works. The original texts of works written in the mother
tongue languages are excluded. Therefore, while the 1990 anthology is
heterolingual in the sense that all four languages figure in it, with English
being the most frequently occurring language, the 1993 reprint version is
a prima facie monolingual anthology that purports to represent literatures
written in four languages.
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116 Chapter 4
Parallel text presentation is an important paratextual device with which

the translational nature of literary anthologies is highlighted. As Cronin
(2011) has observed, the placement of original texts alongside their trans-
lations can point to the bilingual orientation of the target readership; it
may also serve as a symbolic act to sustain the viability of the source lan-
guage. Conversely, the decision not to use a parallel text presentation may
be motivated by the assumption that readers are proficient in a hegemonic
language which, in this case, is also the translating language. It also implies
a disregard of the symbolic status of the source languages in question, such
that the latter are not regarded as being suf ficiently important to warrant
space, both physical and discursive, in a translation anthology. Thus, if
translation is visible in the 1990 anthology due to the existence of parallel
texts, it is only latent in the 1993 reprint version, as there are no parallel
texts to foreground the fact that translation has taken place, even though
this fact has been mentioned in the editor’s introduction. The absence of
source texts in Chinese, Malay and Tamil in the reprint version means that
general readers are forced to understand these literatures through the filter
of the English language. By removing the option to read mother tongue
literatures in their original languages, the reprint version manifests the
ideological statement that ‘a greater portion of the Singaporean’s experi-
ence will be explored and captured through English’.
The editorial decision to include/exclude non-English works in the two
versions of The Fiction of Singapore may also be related to the publisher’s
identity. The 1990 anthology is published under the sponsorship of the
ASEAN Committee on Culture and Information, with no formal mention
of any publishing house. As this publication targets mainly an external,
regional audience, and has the function of showcasing Singapore literature
to other ASEAN member countries, there is perhaps a need to foreground
the city-state’s multilingual niche. This may partially motivate the decision
to include works written in Chinese, Malay and Tamil alongside their
English translations. On the other hand, the 1993 reprint version is formally
published by the Unipress in Singapore. As this publication is intended
primarily for a local readership, it is arguably a prime avenue from where
to project a language ideology that emphasises the importance of English
through its textual visibility. At the same time, however, the anthology still
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lays claim to a multilingual and multicultural representation of literature,

a claim that is somewhat undercut by its monolingual constitution.
‘Voices’ Series: Voices of Singapore: Multilingual Poetry & Prose

Readings; Words for the 25th: Readings by Singapore Writers;
Voices 4: Readings by Singapore Writers
These three anthologies – categorised here under the label Voices – can be
read as a series of textual products of what can be called a ‘performance of
literary multilingualism’ in Singapore. Each of the three publications was
preceded by a programme of multilingual readings in poetry and prose
organised or co-organised by the National University of Singapore between
1989 and 1992.
Voices of Singapore: Multilingual Poetry & Prose Readings was a two-
day multilingual reading session of poetry and prose writings, organised
by the National University of Singapore in 1989 as part of its Diamond
Jubilee Celebrations. The reading programme materialised in the publi-
cation of an anthology under the same name in the following year (Pakir
1990). As stated in its introduction, the anthology ‘marks a significant
pioneering attempt in local literature to include poetry and prose in all
the four of ficial languages in a single collection’ (ibid.: viii). Interestingly,
however, although the writers in the four of ficial languages of Singapore
read in their respective languages during the reading programme in 1989,
the 1990 anthology does not contain the original texts written in Chinese,
Malay and Tamil. In addition to works written originally in English, non-
English works were included only in their English-translated versions. On
this point, the editor expresses regret:
Ideally, the samples of multilingual poetry and prose in this selection should have
been presented in their original languages too. However, there was the constraint of
adequate funds for the purpose. The translations into English have been left as they
are with the minimum of interference. (ibid.)
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118 Chapter 4
The justification for excluding the mother tongue texts is apparently eco-
nomic, but this cannot conceal the ideological move to translate only in
one direction. Moreover, it is unclear what is meant by leaving the English
translations ‘as they are with the minimum of interference’. How is ‘inter-
ference’ to be defined and measured here? In the absence of source texts,
how can (bilingual) readers judge whether or not the mother tongue works
have been ‘interfered with’ in translation? Nevertheless, the editor seems to
have adopted an attitude that is slightly more compassionate towards the
non-English languages, as compared to that demonstrated in The Poetry
of Singapore, where overt allegiance to institutional language ideology is
expressed. In this light, the ordering of the works in the sequence Malay,
Tamil, Chinese, English in Voices of Singapore takes on some significance.
Rather than place English works first, which would further foreground
the symbolic status of English, the editor chooses to prioritise translated
mother tongue literatures. This could serve to mitigate the preeminence
of English as the translating language and, indeed, the sole language that
is used in the anthology. This has the ef fect of enabling the publication to
appear slightly more balanced in terms of the weightage it accords to the
various languages.
Nevertheless, it remains a fact that Voices of Singapore deems English
as the only candidate that can linguistically represent Singapore literature
as an organic whole, resulting in the silencing or, as it were, the colonisa-
tion of the three mother tongue languages. Why, one may ask, are the
non-English works not retained as they are without translation, just like
the works originally composed in English? And why are the English works
not translated into the mother tongue languages? These, as we shall see,
are possible options for a heterolingual literary anthology but have not
been chosen here. I argue that the decision to use a sole language medium
to represent multilingualism (despite its acknowledging the translators)
signals a discursive attempt at perpetuating linguistic homogeneity across
dif ferent literatures through the use of translation.
As the title of the anthology suggests, Words for the 25th: Readings by
Singapore Writers was published to commemorate Singapore’s 25th year
of independence. Although the anthology claims to be ‘a multiethnic,
multi-lingual attempt towards forging a national literature’ (inner cover),
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it is in actual fact a multilingual anthology couched in monolingual terms.

As with Voices of Singapore, English is the only language that figures in the
anthology, which publishes works originally written in English and the
English translations of those written in the mother tongue languages. A
central sign in the anthology is that of the word, which appears in the title:
‘the word is the guardian, repository, soaring instrument with the capac-
ity to reach across time, is portable […] A thriving literature secures the
language as an intimate possession’ (Thumboo et al. 1990a: xix). But from
a language ideological perspective, the anthology does not represent the
word as the multilingual tongue that is the social reality in Singapore, but
as one defined in English. Within the frame of the anthology, the national
literature of Singapore is constructed and defined as being constituted in
English. This ideological manoeuvre, however, is latent, as the anthology
lays explicit claims to multilingual representation. The introduction, for
instance, asks questions that point to the recognition of the reality of
multilingualism and multiculturalism (ibid.: xiii):
How does a monolingual mind-imagination-psyche function […] in a setting of daily

multi-cultural associations? To what extent does that mind […] become bi-tri- or
multi-cultural or lingual? Some cross-cultural traf fic must occur. How does that af fect
the organization and re-structuring of the person? These challenging questions are
likely to generate several answers, almost all provisional.
Although there seems to be some critical ref lection on the relationship

between a monolingual individual and a multilingual society, the anthol-
ogy’s answer to these very questions is implicit in its choice of English as
the translating language: English can facilitate ‘cross-cultural traf fic’ among
all languages, such that the monolingual mind may become ‘bi-tri- or
multi-cultural or lingual’. In imagining a national literature for Singapore,
translation functions as an ideological mechanism to conceal the linguistic
heterogeneity of the literatures written in four languages and to establish
English as the translating and hence the bridging language. The choice of
this translating language, as will become clear later, is less natural than it
might seem.
Voices 4: Readings by Singapore Writers (Ban et al. 1995) adopts the
same translation strategy as the previous two anthologies in the same series.
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120 Chapter 4
While branding itself as a heterolingual publication, it is monolingual in

its make-up. The use of translation – only into English, as usual – is justi-
fied on the basis of a perceived need to promote diversity across dif ferent
languages and literatures:
Given the small population base of Singapore the diversity of languages and cultures
can be a further drawback in that these further restrict the possibility of writers
speaking with each other. If writers restrict themselves to the language they write in
or are compelled because of the lack of a medium of translation and understanding
from reaching out to others the ef fect is to limit the number of fruitful inf luences
and possibilities of cross-fertilisation. Diversity can be a source of strength if it is
actively sought out and used. (ibid.: xii; my emphasis)
Within the discourse of diversity expounded here, literary monolingual-

ism is seen as an antithesis to inter-linguistic interaction:
There was an age when diversity itself was regarded with some despair as if writers
would never make contact and speak with one another. We are now wiser: people will
always speak with each other if they are given the chance and a collection like this
present volume as well as the occasion it came from provide the best illustration of
this […] What we lack yet here are writers proficient in more than one (dare we hope
for all?) languages. (ibid.: xvi; my emphasis)
The understanding is thus that in as far as diversity across languages is ‘a

source of strength’ to be ‘actively sought out and used’, translation serves as
the mediating platform that presumably fulfils a common desire: ‘people
will always speak with each other if they are given the chance’. All this
seems well-intentioned enough, but given that ‘voices’ is a keyword in the
title of the anthology, we ask the questions: through whose ‘voice’ is such
mediation among languages taking place? In the pursuit of ‘contact’ within
a multilingual diversity, do all the four of ficial languages have equal ‘voices’,
if not, why? I would contend that the discursive construction of diversity
in the heterolingual anthology conceals homogenisation across dif ferent
languages. Translation is instrumental to the ideological enterprise here –
the proposed ‘diversity’ is achieved through the translation of linguistic
dif ferences into a single language medium or point of ‘contact’. In ef fect,
a monolingual representation of heterolingual literature is supposed to be
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testimony to ‘diversity’. Out of this ‘diversity’, a concept of ‘unity’ is engi-
neered into existence through translation. Here ‘unity’ is predicated on the
practice of having writers from dif ferent language backgrounds ‘speaking
with each other’ via translation into English. As we shall see in a later exam-
ple, this is not the only way in which the concept can be textually realised.
To sum up the Voices series, the heterolingual nature of Singapore
literature is (mis)represented by a homogeneous linguistic medium via
the act of translation. In operation is a covert translation strategy, where
English translations stand in for their Chinese, Malay and Tamil source
texts, with the original texts being altogether absent. In the context of liter-
ary anthologies, this strategy can be interpreted as one used to downplay
the autonomous linguistic identities of the mother tongue literatures by
filtering them through English, thus limiting their direct access by read-
ers. By suppressing source texts written in the mother tongue languages,
the three anthologies construct an illusion of ‘diversity’ which is at best a
pseudo-diversity veiled by linguistic homogeneity.
Journeys: Words, Home and Nation. Anthology of Singapore

Poetry (1984–1995)
Genealogically, this collection of poetry finds its roots in the 1985 anthol-
ogy The Poetry of Singapore. As stated in its general introduction, Journeys
‘provides stark testimony to the amount of creative energy generated by
Singapore poets since the publication of the ‘Anthology of ASEAN
Literatures: The Poetry of Singapore’ in 1985’ (Thumboo et al. 1995: xxv).
It is therefore unsurprising that Journeys follows the anthological conven-
tions of its predecessor in including the original works written in the four
of ficial languages, while providing as parallel texts the English translations
of all non-English works. Singapore literature is thus once again presented
as a conglomerate of literatures written in dif ferent tongues, with English
spanning all languages as the common linguistic denominator.
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122 Chapter 4
This is ideologically significant considering the fact that Journeys marks

the 30th year of independence for Singapore, a significant moment in the
history of the city-state. In Singapore, the literary anthology is a power-
ful discursive tool commonly deployed at critical junctures, such as in
celebration of national-level events, to reinforce the multilingual identity
of Singapore’s society. The publication of Journeys is one example of such
discursive deployments. The translational relationship that obtains from
anthologies of this kind can help us understand language power relations as
they are institutionalised at a certain point in time. In the case of Journeys,
the decision to translate uni-directionally constructs the image of mutual
intelligibility and communicability among the diverse literatures through
the use of English as a uniting platform.
A central argument of this chapter is that translation serves as an ideo-
logical mechanism in the construction of a heterolingual anthology. The
discursive presence of translation reminds readers of the inherent linguistic
plurality of the anthology, yet within this plurality, translation also creates
a sense of homogeneity. The potential of a language to be translated out
of/into indexes its symbolic power, or its lack thereof. In the context of
Singapore anthologies, it seems that the language more frequently being
translated into commands higher textual visibility and is hence accorded
greater symbolic power. The direction of translation adopted is thus criti-
cal. In the case of Journeys (and in all the case examples discussed earlier),
the translational relationship between English and the mother tongue
languages is starkly asymmetrical: the mother tongue languages are trans-
lated into English, but not the other way round. As we will see later, this
is not a given, but only an option. Underlying this use of English as the
exclusive translating language is the assumption that literatures written in
the mother tongue languages may be read in English, but not vice versa.
In comparison with The Poetry of Singapore, Journeys seems to place
greater emphasis on the role of the translator as cross-cultural mediator.
This can be seen from the fact that the translators are given explicit credit
on the inner cover page along with the editors. It is also worth noting that
the general introduction to the anthology discusses the collected poems in
separate sections divided according to the original language of composition
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rather than as a whole. This has the ef fect of underscoring linguistic dif fer-
ence and hence the salience of translation in the anthology.
Journeys also dif fers from The Poetry of Singapore in terms of the
sequential arrangement of its works. Recall that The Poetry of Singapore
presents its works in the sequence Malay, Tamil, Chinese and English.
As mentioned earlier, the publication is part of the Anthology of ASEAN
Literatures series, targeting an external audience. There would have been a
perceived need to accord discursive status to Malay, which is Singapore’s
national language and closely af filiated to the national languages of
Malaysia and Indonesia, Singapore’s closest neighbours. Under the geo-
political circumstances, it would have been politically insensitive, indeed
precarious, not to prioritise literature written in the national language,
especially when the latter is a dominant language in the region. Tamil is
a minority language with the least number of speakers among the four
of ficial languages in Singapore. I suggest that the decision to place Tamil
in the second position is a move to partially compensate for its minority
status in Singapore. This is followed by works written in Chinese, the
language still spoken and written by a wide population. Works written
in English, the translating language and the language with the highest
symbolic power, come last. This arrangement could have been motivated
by the fact that English is not a mother tongue in the Singapore context
in particular and in the ASEAN context in general. Since the anthology
is part of an ASEAN-oriented publication, a display of an Asian identity
would be more appropriate to the cultural function of the literary series.
The positioning of English thus takes on certain geo-political overtones
here. After all, in Singapore, as in most other ASEAN countries, English
‘is treated as a language that essentially marks a non-Asian “other”’ (Wee
2010: 109).
In contrast, Journeys has no such ethno-political burden, as it is pri-
marily targeted at an internal audience. In terms of the sequential arrange-
ment of poems, the principle at work is demographic: works written in
English are placed first, followed by those written in Chinese, Malay and
Tamil, in descending order of the perceived number of speakers of the
respective languages in Singapore. Here the removal of geopolitical fac-
tors has neutralised the imperative to af ford Malay with a symbolically
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124 Chapter 4
central status and to attenuate the overpowering presence of English in the
discursive configuration of the anthology. This presents an opportunity
for language power considerations to override geopolitical concerns. The
arrangement of works in a heterolingual literary anthology is therefore a
discursive move made on the basis of language ideological considerations.
The sequence in which languages appear is a function of the complex
interplay of ideological factors surrounding the publication and their
relative symbolic capital.
Memories and Desires: A Poetic History of Singapore
This anthology resembles Journeys in respect to some key editorial features.

Firstly, Chinese, Malay and Tamil works are translated into English, and
the original works in the former three languages are included as paral-
lel texts. Secondly, the translators are given formal mention in the inner
book cover. Thirdly, the sequential arrangement of languages follows the
order English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil. The fact that translation fig-
ures importantly in the paratexts, especially through the visible mention
of translators, may at first seem to suggest that the anthology attempts
to highlight its heterolingual nature. However, this stance is somewhat
undermined by the implicit assumption that the various literatures writ-
ten in the four of ficial languages can be seen as a single object of study
within the context of comparative culture. It has earlier been noted that
in the general introduction to Journeys, literary works written in each
of the four languages are discussed in separate sections. In contrast, the
editor of Memories and Desires chooses to discuss Singapore poetry as a
unified discourse, focusing on its inextricable link with the local history
and national identity:
Singapore poetry, in addition to its thematic or stylistic topoi, must also and impor-
tantly be seen in its national topos as well – a topos inseparable from Singapore’s
socio-cultural constituency, its ethnic and religious blend, its colonial history and
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relatively recent independence. Whatever its general debt to and af filiations with
recent Anglo-American writing … Singaporean poetry has remained bound to a
historical project of articulating national identity. (Goh 1998: xvi–xvii)
Here ‘Singapore poetry’ is a constructed category encompassing a wide

range of works written in the four of ficial languages. The linguistic dif fer-
ences, though, are subsumed under this general rubric. Even the passing
reference to the idea of dif ferences emphasises the ‘blend’ of various eth-
nicities and religions rather than their individual identities. In positing a
‘national topos’ for Singapore poetry, which necessitates the suppression of
myriad cultural identities, translation fades into the background. This can
also be seen from the way the editor positions Singapore poetry as a single
unit of analysis in his comparison of cultural representation in Singapore
with that in anglophone Western countries:
To understand the relationship between Singapore poetry and national identity, and
its dif ference from the relationship between poetry and culture in many anglophone
Western countries, it is necessary to acknowledge the fundamentally ‘iconic’ cultural
representation in the latter. (ibid.: xvii)
This passage, which carefully avoids mention of linguistic dif ferences within
the construct of ‘Singapore poetry’, shows that the anthology celebrates
Singapore literature as an organic whole rather than as a larger entity com-
prising smaller, linguistically diverse entities. The editor does, however,
make one reference to the dif ference between English and Chinese poems
in terms of their treatment of historical memory:
There are, of course, sub-varieties of the exemplary model of historical consciousness,
which might be divided along lines of language, race and culture […] it is true that
the [C]hinese poems, for example, have a slightly dif ferent historical sense than, say,
the English ones. The comparison is instructive: the English poems often look back
with a consciousness that is split between West and East, English and Asian language,
rational progressivism and nostalgic pull […] In contrast, many of the Chinese poems,
even in their English translations, speak of the past with the assurance that memory
is accessible and immediate. (ibid.: xxxi–xxxii)
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126 Chapter 4
The phrase ‘even in their English translations’ implies that the predispo-
sition of Chinese poems with respect to the past is distinctive and yet
still communicable in translation. In other words, translation is seen as
a transparent tool in its inter-cultural transfer of meaning codes: even if
the Chinese poems are not read in their own terms, it is deemed possible
for an English reader to understand their meanings through translation.
This conception of translation is very telling of the language ideological
motivation behind the use of English, in this and other similar antholo-
gies, as the sole translating language (as we shall see shortly, this is by no
means the only model that translation anthologies can adopt). The prevail-
ing assumption is that English constitutes the linguistic denomination on
the basis of which literatures written in other languages can and should be
communicated. The consequence of this assumption is that translation is
often conducted uni-directionally into English. In Memories and Desires,
such asymmetry enables translation to subsume all literatures under the
umbrella term ‘Singapore literature’ which foregrounds commonalities
while glossing over dif ferences.
The imbalanced translation relationship between English and the
mother tongue languages that is witnessed in all the anthologies discussed
above can be understood within the context of the synecdochic function
of English. By ‘synecdochic function’ I mean that the concept of ‘English’
can sometimes represent more than merely English-language writing,
but also the larger construct of Singapore literature, of which English-
language literature is but a part. In this regard, it is significant to note
that ‘Singapore literature’ is often synonymous with ‘Singapore English
literature’, but not with ‘Singapore Chinese/Malay/Tamil literature’. This is
evidenced by the fact that many anthologies of the local literature written
in the English language often bear titles that do not specify the language
concerned. In other words, it is optional for a monolingual anthology
of English-language literary works to bear the word ‘English’ in its title.
Among many others, these include publications such as Singapore Yarn:
An Anthology of Singapore Stories (Society of Singapore Writers 2002a)
and Tides of Memories and Other Singapore Poems (Society of Singapore
Writers 2002b). Here ‘Singapore stories’ and ‘Singapore poems’ refer in
fact to ‘Singapore stories in English’ and ‘Singapore poems in English’
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respectively. In contrast, anthologies of literature written in the mother

tongue languages do not seem to enjoy the privilege of omitting reference
to the specific medium used. For example, anthologies of Chinese literature
in Singapore often foreground in their titles the neologism xinhua wenxue
[Singaporean Chinese literature] as their identity label. This linguistic
markedness of Chinese identity points to its lack of symbolic capital in the
polysystem of Singapore literature. Conversely, English remains relatively
unmarked because it has the power not only to denote its own literature
but also to metonymically represent the image of Singapore national lit-
erature as a whole.
Rhythms: A Singapore Millennial Anthology of Poetry
The publication of Rhythms: A Singapore Millennial Anthology of Poetry

(Singh and Wong 2000) is a significant event for two reasons. First, it marks
not only the turn of the millennium but also the 35th anniversary of the
city-state; second, and more importantly for our purposes, it is a landmark
publication in the practice of literary anthologisation in Singapore. The
anthology, commissioned by the National Council of Arts, collects a total
of 101 poems across the four of ficial languages. What distinguishes this
heterolingual anthology from its predecessors is that each poem is trans-
lated into the other three languages. In other words, each poem appears
in four languages, including its original language; each of the four of ficial
languages hence serves both as a source language and as a target language.
This is a ground-breaking feature, as no such approach to translation had
been adopted in any of the literary collections hitherto published. In this
sense, Rhythms is the first genuinely heterolingual anthology in Singapore.
Its adoption of ‘cross/across translation’ challenges the implicit assumption
in previous anthologies that English has to be/should be the only language
of translation across Singapore’s multilingual terrain:
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128 Chapter 4
Because Singaporeans tend to be bilingual it seemed easier to translate/transcreate

these creative expressions into English in a one-to-one process rather than attempt the
daunting task of cross/across translations/transcreations […] For some this would be a
project of and for the national agenda […] for others a mammoth realization that as
a people we are capable of communicating across languages and cultural traditions,
and yet for others a wonderful firsthand experience of a poetry going beyond its own
linguistic borders. (Singh and Wong 2000: 16–17; my emphasis)
The implication of ‘cross/across translations’ is that the four of ficial lan-
guages receive equal discursive status in the anthology. As argued earlier,
previous anthologies of heterolingual literature demonstrate that a lan-
guage that is more often translated into – invariably English – possesses
greater symbolic power. Or, we could venture to say that the language that
translates takes capital out of the language that is translated. In Rhythms,
English, for a change, is no longer the exclusive target language; it is not
only translated into but also translated out of. On the other hand, the
mother tongue languages, previously serving only as source languages, are
now also translated into, thus gaining a higher visibility in the publication,
by virtue of their higher frequency of appearance.
We thus witness a change in the translational model adopted in the
heterolingual anthologies thus far surveyed. In The Poetry of Singapore, The
Fiction of Singapore, the Voices series, Journeys and Memories and Desires,
an asymmetric ‘one-to-one’ (or unilateral) model is adopted, whereby
each of the mother tongue languages is translated into English, but not
vice versa (Table 4). In contrast, a ‘many-to-many’ (or multilateral) model
is adopted in Rhythms, which yields multiple linguistic configurations
(Table 5). In the latter model, the original works and their triple transla-
tions network into a complex linguistic matrix that constructs Singapore
literature as a balanced multilingual site. This change in translational
model ref lects a subtle shift in language ideology, demonstrating a stra-
tegic attempt to project a multicultural identity not exclusively mediated
through English.
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Table 4: The ‘one-to-one’ translation model*
Target Language
ENG CHI MAL TAM

Source Language
ENG   
CHI   
MAL   
TAM   
* ENG, CHI, MAL and TAM stand for English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil respectively.
‘’ represents the non-existence of translation from a certain source to a certain target
language, while ‘’ represents the existence of such translation.
Table 5: The ‘many-to-many’ translation model
Target Language
ENG CHI MAL TAM

Source Language
ENG   
CHI   
MAL   
TAM   
What is additionally remarkable about Rhythms is that it emanates

a much more nuanced conception of literary translation, as compared
to the assumption of transparent communication through translation
implicit in previous anthologies. To capture this enhanced understanding
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130 Chapter 4
of translation as a multi-directional inter-cultural process, the neologism

‘transcreation’ is coined:
Translations can never be perfect; so we decided we will also use the term transcrea-
tions, a term that does not sit easy on many ears. The poem rewritten in another
language is always vulnerable to misreading, misinterpretation, misshaping: what is
needed is an indulgent, generous spirit which allows for all these to happen without
the reader losing respect for the original creation … a creative rendition might benefit
from the term transcreations since it acknowledges the process crucial to the rework-
ing in another language. (Singh and Wong 2000: 17; my emphasis)
The conception of translation here echoes Lefevere’s (1992) notion of
translation as a form of ‘rewriting’ which, following Lefevere’s definition,
includes anthologisation. The editors of Rhythms do not posit the exist-
ence of an all-encompassing language that performs the bridging function
of cross/inter-cultural communication. Instead, translation is seen as an
interpretively contingent process that is ‘always vulnerable to misread-
ing, misinterpretation, misshaping’. This new perspective on translation
deconstructs the myth of English as the single transcendental language
that travels across linguistic barriers unproblematically, and the myth that
translation into English is the panacea to multilingual and multicultural
communication in Singapore. What Rhythms has proposed as an alter-
native model is a broad-based, multi-directional dialectic among all the
four languages.
However, despite its attempts to subvert certain language ideological
notions guiding previous anthologies, Rhythms still conforms to conven-
tional discursive practices in its linguistic arrangement of works in the
order Malay, Chinese, Tamil and English. This is a dif ferent arrangement
from that in Journeys and Memories and Desires (English, Chinese, Malay,
Tamil), and close to, though not exactly the same as, the one adopted in
The Poetry of Singapore, The Fiction of Singapore and the Voices series (Malay,
Tamil, Chinese, English). As Rhythms is a publication with a much higher
profile than Journeys and Memories and Desires, having been sponsored
by a government institution and published in commemoration of the
new millennium and 35 years of Singapore’s independence, it is reason-
able to expect that the editors would feel obliged to be sensitive to ethnic
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sensibilities. The mother tongue works are therefore placed before English
works, with Malay works appearing first to mark the symbolic status of
Malay as the national language. The back-positioning of English works is
also consistent with the anthology’s underlying ideology that English can
no longer serve as the sole target language to facilitate literary translation
in multilingual Singapore.
Unity in Diversity: Anthology of Poems, Short Stories & Essays
This anthology comprises works by students from the Special Training

Programme for mother tongue language teachers in the National Institute
of Education, Singapore. Granted that this is not a high profile publication
in the sense that it is published by an educational institute as a collection
of student projects rather than by a publishing house as a professionally
edited anthology, Unity in Diversity does have one unique textual feature:
it employs the strategy of non-translation. In other words, works written in
English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil are juxtaposed alongside one another
in their original languages, without mediating translations. There are only
two places where some kind of translation is visible: in the contents page,
where the titles of all works are translated into English, and at the end of
the anthology, where English abstracts of all works are given. This approach
is highly unique considering the fact that no other anthology to date has
made an attempt not to translate its multilingual works.
As Tymoczko (2002: 19) has pointed out, in gathering and assessing
evidence in translation studies, zero translation, or non-translation, of
texts or segments of texts is highly significant. Tymoczko deals primarily
with the microscopic level of analysis here, focusing on the textual omis-
sion of specific passages in source and translated texts. In the present case,
the idea of non-translation is taken up at the macroscopic level, where the
absence of translation does not occur in the form of omitted passages in the
translated texts, but in the form of the deliberate maintenance of linguistic
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132 Chapter 4
autonomy in the context of a heterolingual anthology. The concept of

non-translation now takes on a new dimension as it is tied to questions of
language identity. The anthologies that we have considered thus far focus
on ‘unity’ through tapping into the discursive potentials of translation, pro-
moting the image of intelligibility and communicability across the diverse
cultures in Singapore. In contrast, Unity in Diversity emphasises linguistic
heterogeneity and diversity by leaving the communicative gaps between
languages and cultures as they are via non-translation. The decision to pub-
lish local works of literature strictly in their respective languages, linked
only by translated English titles and short English abstracts, constructs a
very dif ferent image of Singapore literature. The emerging picture is that
of the four of ficial languages and their representative cultures co-existing
in a multilingual realm, interfacing with one another via the limited use
of English as the mediating language, while very much retaining their
relative autonomy.
At first sight this editorial stance may seem to violate the ethos of
multilingual Singapore that is exhibited in some of the earlier antholo-
gies. A tentative explanation could be that because Unity in Diversity is
a relatively low-profile publication of student works, a slight deviation
from conventional language ideology by way of the non-translation of
non-English works is tolerable. Nevertheless, concessions to the domi-
nant ideology are still made in the form of the arrangement of works and
especially the provision of English paratextual supplements, i.e. titles and
abstracts. Works written in English are placed first, followed by those in
Chinese, Malay and Tamil, a sequential order which accords symbolic
status to the English language and is quite typical of anthologies targeting
an internal audience. Given that the publishing body, the Special Training
Programme of the National Institute of Education, is a training institution
for mother tongue language teachers in Singapore, such an arrangement
can be seen as slightly ironic.
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READ! Singapore Series: Looking In, Looking Out;

Ties That Bind; Home and Away
READ! Singapore is a key annual event organised by the National Library

Board (NLB) of Singapore ‘to promote a culture of reading among
Singaporeans as it aims to provide Singaporeans with an opportunity to
rediscover the joys of reading, by creating a common topic of discussion
and conversation amongst people’ (NLB n.d.: online). The objective of
the programme is not merely to encourage Singaporeans to read, but to
‘read across cultures and communities’ (READ! 2008: online). To achieve
this, the NLB has initiated the publication of heterolingual anthologies
of fictional works written in English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil by both
local and international authors to promote cross-cultural reading among
Singaporeans. Since the publications in question involve all four of ficial
languages, translation naturally becomes central to the operation of the
programme.
In 2006, the anthology Looking In, Looking Out (NLB 2006) was
published in four separate monolingual versions, one in each of the of ficial
languages. In 2007, Ties that Bind (NLB 2007) was published in three bilin-
gual versions: English/Chinese, English/Malay and English/Tamil. In 2008,
Home and Away (NLB 2008) was published in one monolingual version
in English and three bilingual versions in English/Chinese, English/Malay
and English/Tamil. One can immediately perceive similarities between this
series of anthologies and Rhythms (Singh and Wong 2000), as both adopt
the multi-directional, ‘many-to-many’ approach to translation, whereby
each text composed in one of the four of ficial languages is translated into
the other three languages.
There is a subtle dif ference between the two, though. While Rhythms
is a single multilingual volume, the READ! Singapore series takes the form
of separate monolingual or bilingual versions. In Looking In, Looking Out,
each volume contains works written in one language as well as works trans-
lated into that language from the other three languages. Thus, the Chinese
volume includes original works written in Chinese as well as the Chinese
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134 Chapter 4
translations of works written in English, Malay and Tamil, but not the
original works written in the latter languages. The absence of parallel source
texts has important implications, as it creates the cognitive illusion that
each of the monolingual versions stands in its own right, independent of
any extraneous source. This is supported by the paratextual fact that the
identities of translators are kept invisible throughout the anthology.
Ties That Bind and Home and Away are slightly dif ferent from Looking
In, Looking Out in that the fictional texts are published in separate bilingual
versions in English in addition to one of the mother tongue languages.
Translation is still multi-directional here, since every text is translated into
three other languages; however, English is given slightly greater promi-
nence with its coupling with each of Chinese, Malay and Tamil. This edi-
torial strategy performs two ideological functions. Firstly, it establishes
the importance of the mother tongue languages in Singapore through
their use as languages of both literary writing and translation. Secondly,
it reinforces the inter-ethnic bridging function of English by pairing one
mother tongue language with English in each version. Each mother tongue
language stands in isolation from the others, but always necessarily in
combination with English.3 As a result, when seen in totality, English is
unambiguously the most frequently occurring language in Ties That Bind
and Home and Away, for it appears in every bilingual version, along with
translations into each of the mother tongue languages. Home and Away
even goes so far as to publish a separate monolingual English version of
all the texts, which further accentuates the transcendental autonomy of
English vis-à-vis Chinese, Malay and Tamil.
I would argue that this editorial move is fully consistent with the policy
of ‘English-knowing bilingualism’ (Kachru 1992; Pakir 1992) adopted in
Singapore. It ref lects the demographic and sociolinguistic reality in the
city-state, where each of the three major ethnic groups is constituted by its
3 This is not a parallel-text (ST/TT) arrangement, as two texts in a bilingual version

of the anthologies could both be translations. For instance, in an English/Malay
bilingual anthology, a text originally written in Chinese would appear in Malay and
English translations and the original text in Chinese would appear in the English/
Chinese version.
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own language and culture, with English as the common denominator. The
bilingual approach attempts to construct a well-balanced relation among
the of ficial languages in Singapore by stressing the importance of mother
tongue languages by way of translating into them, while not compromis-
ing the position of English as the overarching channel of inter-linguistic
communication.
We can thus see that in the READ series, there is a web of multi-
directional translation which is as equally intricate as that in Rhythms,
only that this ‘web’ is not presented in the conventional parallel-text
format. As in Rhythms, the READ series is dif ferent from earlier antholo-
gies published in the 1980s and 1990s in that it subverts the hitherto
unchallenged position of English as the exclusive language of translation
by way of enabling – and therefore empowering – mother tongue lan-
guages to translate rather than merely be translated. The series proposes
a heterogeneous model of achieving cross-cultural communication in
Singapore, one that practises not a uni-directional, ‘one-to-one’ transla-
tion between English and the mother tongue Others, but a multiplicity
of translations between and among dif ferent languages. In this regard,
the READ series has gone even further down the road than Rhythms in
creating mono-/bilingual versions of multilingual texts. It shows that
cross-cultural communication need not be textually realised by the con-
current co-existence of all four of ficial languages within a single reading.
It also demonstrates that cross-cultural communication may not involve
the conventional co-reference between source and target texts, as the
‘source’ language may not always be present in a single bilingual version
of the anthologies. The implication is that it is possible to understand
the culture of Other via translation solely in terms of the language of
‘We’, and that the role of this ‘We’ language can be played by any and all
of the four of ficial languages.
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136 Chapter 4
The ideological role of translation in heterolingual literary

anthologies
Translation assumes a pivotal role in the shifting language ideologies in

multilingual Singapore. It serves as a key instrument in the shaping of lan-
guage power relations in multilingual literary anthologies and is therefore
a site of language ideological struggle (Meylaerts 2006a: 86) in Singapore.
Based on the relations between literary texts and their translations, the fol-
lowing five scenarios can be seen to emerge from the twelve anthologies
considered in this chapter:
Scenario 1
Works written in the three mother tongue languages are translated into
English, but the original texts in these languages are not published along-
side their English translations. Works originally written in English remain
untranslated. This can be seen in the three anthologies in the Voices series
(1990, 1995) as well as the reprinted version of The Fiction of Singapore
(1993).
Scenario 2
Works written in the three mother tongue languages are translated into
English, and the original texts in these languages are published alongside
their English translations as parallel texts. Works originally written in
English remain untranslated. This can be seen in The Poetry of Singapore
(1985), The Fiction of Singapore (1990), Journeys (1995) and Memories and
Desires (1998).
Scenario 3
Works written in each of the four of ficial languages are translated into the
other three languages, and the original texts written in all languages are
published alongside all their translations. All works are being published in
a single multilingual volume. This can be seen in Rhythms (2000).
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Scenario 4
Works written in all languages remain untranslated, and are published in a
single multilingual volume. This can be seen in Unity in Diversity (2005).
Scenario 5
Works written in each of the four of ficial languages are translated into the
other three languages. Works are published in the form of either monolin-
gual volumes (each containing works originally written in one language as
well as works translated into this language from the other three languages)
and/or bilingual volumes (each containing works/translations in English
and a mother tongue language). This can be seen in the three anthologies
under the READ! Singapore series (2006, 2007, 2008).
Figure 1 is a schematic and chronological representation of the above scenar-

ios. The figure shows a continuum of change in the language configurations
in multilingual literary anthologies over a 23-year span. Notwithstanding
the overlaps between the time periods represented by each scenario, it is
possible to discern a trend towards the implementation of multi-directional
translation between and among the four languages. Three tendencies are
visible with regard to translation and language relations. Firstly, while
anthologies published in the 1980s and 1990s have English as their default
translating language, and the mother tongue languages as the translated
languages, those published after the millennium tend to inject more bal-
ance in this asymmetric relation by translating into the mother tongue
languages as well. Secondly, in earlier anthologies, English translations may
sometimes stand in for their original texts to the latter’s exclusion from the
publications; in more recent anthologies, however, English is less often used
exclusively to represent the multilingual literature of Singapore; the mother
tongue languages are normally present. Thirdly, while earlier anthologies
often use parallel-text formats, very recent anthologies published after 1995
subvert this conventional practice by publishing translations in mono-/
bilingual volumes. In the context of the gradual decline in the use of the
mother tongue languages among the younger generation of Singaporeans,
these changes can be read as part of a continuing attempt to mitigate the
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138 Chapter 4
problem by enhancing the visibility of the mother tongue languages and
increasing their symbolic capital.
Scenarios 1 and 2 Scenario 3 Scenario 4 Scenario 5
MTL → EL only MTL → EL – zero translation of MTL → EL

texts
– published in EL only/ EL → MTL EL → MTL
with MTL/EL parallel texts – published as a
MTL → MTL single multilingual MTL → MTL
volume
Timeline
1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2008
Figure 1: Schematic representation of the translation relation between English and
mother tongue languages in multilingual literary anthologies (1985–2008).
MTL stands for ‘mother tongue language(s)’, EL stands for ‘English language’,
→ means ‘translated into’.
It would be interesting to set the ideological role of translation in the

negotiation of language power relations described above against Casanova’s
(1999/2004) theory on the relation between translation and the circulation
of symbolic capital in global literary exchanges. In arguing for the exist-
ence of a world literary space in which dif ferent national literatures are
engaged in a struggle for visibility and prestige in the global literary market,
Casanova (ibid.) suggests that translation does not involve a neutral, lateral
transfer of meaning from one language to another. Rather, it is a process
of littérisation, whereby literary works written in dominated and less vis-
ible languages are accepted as ‘literary’ by being translated into dominant
languages that hold stronger linguistic capital in the ‘world republic of
letters’ (ibid.: 136). In this way, the power relations among various litera-
tures and languages are negotiated via the site of literary translation, ‘the
major prize and weapon in international literary competition’ (ibid.: 133).
Casanova’s conception of literary translation as a power broker in
the struggle for space among dif ferent languages and literatures provides
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theoretical insight into the translation situation in Singapore. Literary

translation, which is a central mechanism in the making of the multilingual
literary anthologies analysed in the preceding sections, is not a neutral,
horizontal movement of meaning across linguistic barriers. It is often an
unequal exchange that involves tension between dominating and dominated
languages. As my analysis has shown, the mode of translation adopted in
a multilingual anthology has implications on the type of language power
relations that is being endorsed, either explicitly or implicitly. Casanova’s
(ibid.: 135) conclusion that the act of translation is not merely ‘the passage
from one language to another’ but a ground on which the relative statuses
of various languages and literatures are played out resonates well with my
conception of the role of translation as the mediator of power relations
between English and the mother tongue languages.
However, my analysis also presents an alternative case that dif fers
slightly from Casanova’s model. I earlier explained that Casanova (ibid.:
135) suggests that when literatures written in weaker languages are translated
into dominant languages, they move toward the centre of the world literary
space, thereby gaining more literary capital and obtaining ‘the certificate
of literary standing’ through their consecration at the centre of the liter-
ary universe. On the other hand, when literatures written in a dominant
language are translated into a weaker language, they expand their inf luence
through ‘an international dif fusion of central literary capital’ (ibid.: 134),
thereby perpetuating their hegemonic status. This suggests that a certain
literature and language, whether it be dominant or dominated, that is
translated out of and into another language will always lead to an increased
symbolic capital and prestige in this literature and language.
Granting that Casanova has presented a very convincing case within
the context of the world republic of letters, I propose a dif ferent equation
for the translational situation in Singapore in respect to language power,
while Casanova’s theory deals with literary prestige that hinges on lan-
guage power. I would argue that in the context of heterolingual literary
anthologies in Singapore, a language that is translated into gains visibility
by becoming the discursive medium representing other languages and
cultures, whereas a language translated out of loses its visibility by becom-
ing the represented Other. For instance, when a mother tongue language
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140 Chapter 4
such as Chinese – a non-H language relative to English – is translated

into the dominant English language, it loses even more symbolic capital.
This is because the literature that is written in Chinese now becomes re-
presented in another medium. Although one could say that the literature
itself has been disseminated to a larger audience through translating into a
language with higher symbolic capital, the language encoding this literature
loses visibility in the course of being translated. This is especially evident
in the earlier ‘heterolingual’ anthologies which only collect English trans-
lated versions of literary works written originally in Chinese, Malay and
Tamil. I would thus argue that non-H languages in the Singapore context,
including Chinese, do not gain symbolic capital when they are translated
out of. English, on the other hand, reinforces its hegemonic status when
it translates Chinese, Malay and Tamil literary works due to its increased
visibility and symbolic capacity to represent other languages and literatures.
I argue that when the H-language translates itself into a non-H-
language, it could lose rather than gain (some of its) symbolic capital.
We have observed that in heterolingual literary anthologies published in
more recent years, English has increasingly become translated out of, and
the mother tongue languages are increasingly being translated into. As
English is now no longer the only translating language, its visibility is not
as high as it used to be in earlier anthologies. This shift in the direction
of translation shares out part of the symbolic capital of the English lan-
guage to the mother tongue languages, which now enjoy a higher visibility
and corporeal existence than before, by virtue of their ability to translate
English-language works.
This is the fundamental basis upon which translation activates its
ideological potential in Singapore. This potential can be unleashed in two
ways; or, as Cronin (1998: 148) argues with respect to minority languages,
translation is ‘both predator and deliverer, enemy and friend’. On the one
hand, it has been observed that the use of English as the sole language of
translation is a move towards linguistic homogeneity, reinforcing the domi-
nating status of English and the dominated status of the mother tongue
languages. This ‘one-to-one’ model of translation ref lects an unequal, asym-
metric power relation, wherein the language of power ef fects a hegemonic
stance towards the ‘weaker’ ethnic languages. On the other end of the scale,
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the non-translation of all works in a multilingual anthology can potentially

become a form of discursive resistance against the hegemonic power of
English and as subjecting to question the notion of inter-ethnic commu-
nication through a universal language. The refusal to translate signals a
refusal to submit to the dominance of the language of power.
The ‘many-to-many’ translation approach, based on multi-directional
translation between and among all four of ficial languages in Singapore, is
a mid-point between the two extremes. It creates a sense of balance and
heterogeneity by translating both into and out of all four of ficial languages,
which gives the mother tongue languages a ‘voice’ of their own. The model
ref lects a new interpretation of the power relationship among the languages
in Singapore, and the recognition that English is not the panacea for solv-
ing cross-cultural communication. A more sophisticated cross-linguistic
mode of translation between and among languages is deemed necessary
to truly realise dialogue across cultures, and at the same time to preserve
the identity of each individual language and culture. The English language,
while still acting as a binding thread, no longer silences the mother tongue
languages in an asymmetric relation.
Conclusion
As a double-edged sword, translation is not assigned a particular role in

defining the language ideology of a literary anthology. It can reinforce
the symbolic power of the dominant language, create a discursive balance
among the symbolic powers of all languages, or do both. I have also iden-
tified a subtle shift in the power relation between the English language
and the mother tongue languages within the linguistic constitution of
heterolingual anthologies published between 1985 and 2008. It has been
established that translation holds the key to this ideological shift, whereby
the change in translation approach from a uni-directional, ‘one-to-one’
model to a multi-directional, ‘many-to-many’ model leads to a shift in the
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142 Chapter 4
discursive relationship between English and the mother tongue languages.

Specifically, the shift is from an asymmetric relation in favour of English
as the language of power to a balanced relation that bestows visibility and
voice to all languages. This change could be attributed to an ongoing ef fort
on the part of literary institutions to raise the status of the mother tongue
languages and thereby sustain their continued existence.
Lindsay (2006), in her essay on performance translation in Asia, raises
the following questions: Does the provision of translation precisely contrib-
ute to the globalisation of experience? Is it a way to acknowledge hetero-
geneity, or is it part of a process of homogenisation? To which her answer
is both, explaining that ‘the tension between these impulses is precisely
the inherent tension of translation itself ’ (ibid.: 31). Lindsay’s finding is
found to be applicable to the Singapore case. The analysis in this chapter has
shown that a single ideological function cannot be postulated for transla-
tion in multilingual societies. Translation, as it is used in the portrayal of
national images in multilingual literary anthologies in Singapore, exhibits
such ‘inherent tension’ between opposing impulses. I have shown how
translation can serve very dif ferent functions as an ideological mechanism
in multilingual anthologies. On the one hand, it can reinforce asymmetric
power relations by solely translating into one dominant language at the
expense of the weaker languages; on the other hand, it can discursively
foreground heterogeneity by translating into and out of all languages.
In multilingual Singapore, translation practice is double-edged in
terms of the language ideology it can perpetuate in discursive practices
such as literary anthologisation. The use of translation may point to the
endorsement of multilingualism, by virtue of its bridging function among
ethnic communities. This can be clearly seen in the enterprise of literary
anthologisation itself, wherein the act of translation is testament to the
heterogeneity of language and culture in Singapore, and thus the need
for interlingual communication. However, the act of translation can also
undermine multilingualism by discursively projecting a unified image
among the various literatures as, for instance, when a multilingual literary
anthology publishes mother tongue language literatures only in English
translation. The two roles seem to be in conf lict with each other, but are
paradoxically not mutually exclusive. It is thus possible for translation to
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serve the two roles simultaneously within the same discourse. This is most
evident in multilingual anthologies in which works written in mother
tongue languages are published alongside their English translations. In such
a situation, translation can be seen as paradoxical in respect to its dual role
in negotiating the symbolic power relation between languages and cultural
identities in Singapore, simultaneously fulfiling the ideological impulses of
fostering homogeneity and heterogeneity. This characteristic of translation
has been aptly summarised in the literature as follows:
The study of translation in charged political contexts illustrates the relationship
between discourse and power, and shows that, as a site where discourses meet and
compete, translation negotiates power relations. But the workings of power are not
simply ‘top down,’ a matter of inexorable repression and constraint; instead, transla-
tion, like other cultural activities, can be mobilized for counterdiscourses and subver-
sion, or for any number of mediating positions in between […] translators […] often
find themselves simultaneously caught in both camps, representing both the institu-
tions in power and those seeking empowerment. (Gentzler and Tymoczko 2002: xix)
Indeed, in the ideologically charged linguistic context of Singapore, transla-

tion is more than a ‘top down’ operation. It can be mobilised either to rein-
force the hegemonic status of English, or to resist/subvert such hegemony
by reclaiming the suppressed identities of the weaker mother tongue lan-
guages, or both. It is the locus of complex language ideological struggles.
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Chapter 5
Conclusion: Rethinking (Un)translatability and

Intercultural Communication
In her essay Chinese-English, English-Chinese: Biliteracy and Translation,

Ho (2010: 57) laments the fact that cultural identity in Hong Kong is rarely
‘posited as a conceptual category or a process that language use inscribes
and transcribes’. She attempts to rectify this by focusing on the ‘modalities
of biliteracy’ – or ways of seeing biliteracy – and exploring the ‘discourse of
identity generated by the texts in relations that are forged by a literacy that
is bilingual and interlingual’ (ibid.: 60). Ho takes as her point of departure
the debate on the medium of instruction in Hong Kong educational institu-
tions to ref lect upon the complex relationship between biliterate language
use and local identity. Through an analysis of three sets of parallel texts in
Chinese and English, Ho explores how these texts portray dif ferent bilit-
erate modalities. Drawing on post-structuralist paradigms in translation
studies, she posits three ways in which interlingual practice interacts with
a Chinese–English identity in Hong Kong: (1) by reinscribing notions of
identity that an original text sets out to critique, (2) by establishing the
simultaneity of Chinese and English while deconstructing the self-other
distinctions between them, and (3) by presenting the traf fic between the
two languages as biliterate interaction between dif ferent worlds. By think-
ing of biliterate practices as ‘tropes of cultural identity’, Ho (ibid.) attempts
to fill the conceptual gap between biliteracy and cultural identity and to
illustrate the subjectivity ‘that emerges from the traf fic between English
and Chinese, the space that conjoins and separates the two languages’. This
is resonant with Bhabha’s (1994) popular notion of a Third Space – the
zone of f lux between two determinate cultures – and of Cronin’s (2006)
articulation of translation as a performance of intercultural subjectivity.
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146 Chapter 5
Without suggesting that the translational experience in Singapore

bears any resemblance to that in Hong Kong, we may harness some useful
concepts from Ho’s study to help us elucidate the relationship between
translation and language ideology in Singapore. In conceptualising trans-
lation as a manifestation of cross-lingual practice, we are locating the two
at dif ferent levels of representation. Translation denotes both the tech-
nical process of transfer between languages and the material product of
such transfer. Cross-lingual practice, both biliterate and multi-literate, in
contrast, is an abstract, meta-level notion that encompasses the concrete
process/product of translation and, at the same time, is the outcome of
the latter. By looking at translation practices as biliterate and mult-literate
modalities, the present study has in ef fect explored the conceptual ramifica-
tion of translation in the articulation of a discourse of identity – one that
has come to be called ‘Chineseness’ – in multilingual Singapore.
In Chapters 2 and 3, I focused on the discourse of Chineseness and
the implications of translating such discourse as it ‘emerges from the traf fic
between English and Chinese, the space that conjoins and separates the two
languages’ (Ho 2010: 60). From the textual perspective, Chapter 2 exam-
ined how Chinese–English code-switching is represented in translation,
particularly in the case where the embedded language in the ST becomes
the matrix language in the TT. My interest, however, is not in the techni-
cal dif ficulties arising from this tricky task; rather, I am interested in how
the engagement of a set of bilingual texts with the language ideological
context in which they are found generates a paradox of the code, whereby
the language of the negative Other turns into a dominant code discours-
ing against itself. The phenomenon of code-switching is therefore not
merely the encounter of codes in discourse, and its translation is not just
about the performance of linguistic feats. A social semiotic perspective
on code-switching in translation throws light on the tension between the
codes in a switching/mixing relation and the irony that persists when the
codes are indexically reversed in translation. More specifically, it reveals
how translation can reinscribe notions of identity that an original text sets
out to critique (Ho 2010: 65). The ensuing crisis of representation points
to a textual predicament whose implications go beyond untranslatability:
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Conclusion 147
it marks a power dif ferential between languages that is also materialised

in the asymmetrical treatment of bilingualism in translation.
Literary texts that operate on ‘the motif of loss’ of fer us a chance to take
a closer look at the epistemological issues emanating from the translation of
identity-sensitive texts. Chapter 3 revolves around the question of whether
it is possible for anglophone readers of the literary texts in question to fulfil
a positive ethics of translation, that is, to understand the sinophone other
in its own terms. It is all too easy to posit an idealistic, neutral interpretive
position on the part of the anglophone reader, to claim that it is possible
for readers of a conf licting language ideological position to step outside
of their own presumptions and achieve empathy with the Other. But as
reception theorists have reminded us, readers derive their own reading
experience from the specific cultural matrix in which they are embed-
ded. Literary reading and interpretation are not disembodied activities,
such that we cannot simplify the encounter between anglophone Chinese
Singaporean readers and translated texts that expound heavily on Chinese
identity consciousness and in which English, as both language and culture,
is an absolute Other. This encounter, I suggest, is fraught with tension and
may land the anglophone reader, whose language identity is implicated in
the interpretive process, in an epistemological dilemma. The examples in
Chapter 3 have shown that in interpreting identity-sensitive texts, anglo-
phone readers either perform an act of self-Othering in fully empathising
with the predicament of the sinophone community, or otherwise play out
a negative ethics of reading by subscribing to their own anglophone Self
– invariably the negative Other in the world of the (translated) literary
texts. While translation and biliterate representation can in some cases
establish the simultaneity of Chinese and English while deconstructing
the self-other distinctions between them (Ho 2010: 68), my case examples
from Singapore illustrate that self-other distinctions – which can neither
be neatly constructed nor neatly deconstructed – problematise the reading
of identity in translation. This is especially so in the midst of the illusion of
equivalence established by the ‘simulacrum of parity’ (ibid.: 65) between
Chinese–English parallel texts.
Turning to literary anthologies, the scope of the problem is elevated
to the level of discourse. As a discursive mechanism that mediates the
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148 Chapter 5
power relations between various languages in heterolingual anthologies,

translation embodies the contradictory functions of reinforcing and resist-
ing the dominance of hegemonic languages. In this regard, the direction
of translation and material visibility of languages involved in translation
af fect the extent to which a language is af forded its own literary voice. The
decision to employ either unilateral or multilateral translation and whether
source languages with lesser symbolic capital should/can be represented
or suppressed are, in turn, editorial choices motivated by, amongst other
considerations, the prevailing language ideology. In the case of the dozen
Singapore anthologies surveyed, we witness how translation either exacer-
bates the power of English or redresses the asymmetry in the power rela-
tions between English and the mother tongue languages. In either case, the
desired relation is achieved by manipulating the devices of directionality
and visibility, and such manipulation is ef fected in order to fulfil certain
socio-political agendas that govern the production of the anthologies
in question. We have also seen that a more ‘democratic’ representation
of languages in a multilingual society such as Singapore can be achieved
through multilateral translation, which brings us closer to presenting the
traf fic between the two languages as biliterate interaction between dif ferent
worlds (Ho 2010: 72).
By triangulating the textual, interpretive and discursive dimensions
of translation, I seek to elucidate the tensions and paradoxes involved in
cross-lingual practice in multilingual Singapore. Part of such tensions and
paradoxes pertain to the degree of translatability. For instance, how translat-
able are literary texts that employ code-switching as an identity marker of
the cultural Other, when the code-switched elements are back-translated
into their own language? And how about texts that pose no apparent prob-
lems to the translator linguistically, but nevertheless generate a paradox
when read by a specific target readership due to their language ideological
orientation? In previous writings on problems emanating from translation
practice, untranslatability has become so clichéd that it seems too banal to
warrant the notion any further attention. Here I would suggest a radical
rethinking of untranslatability from the perspective of related pedagogies
in intercultural communication. Specifically, I do not perceive untranslat-
ability as a negative attribute inherent in cross-lingual practice, but rather
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Conclusion 149
as a fertile ground which can be drawn on to problematise simplistic con-

ceptions of cross-cultural understanding. The presence of untranslatable
elements, in other words, is not a barrier but rather an opportunity to gain
a nuanced understanding of such discursive notions as ‘unity in diversity’,
‘bridging gaps between cultures’ and the like, all of which are common
propagandistic slogans in multilingual and multicultural societies.
Problems such as those encountered in Chapters 2 and 3 may not
eventually avail themselves of a viable solution, be it textual or epistemo-
logical. However, this does not mean that these problems – essentially the
problem of untranslatability – are necessarily adversaries. Neither the crisis
of representation in translating bilingual texts in multilingual societies nor
the interpretive dilemma that anglophone readers face in their reading
of translated texts needs to be seen in negative light, that is, as obstacles
to cross-lingual and cross-cultural communication. We could, perhaps,
entertain the possibility of altering our perspective to see such problems as
windows through which we can teach students about the heterogeneity as
opposed to any perceived homogeneity between languages and cultures. In
other words, the problems associated with untranslatability are potential
pedagogical tools.
Even today, when ‘equivalence’ has long since been exposed as an
untenable theoretical construct, the underlying focus in much translation
teaching is still on an implicit or explicit search for ‘equivalents’ at various
levels – lexical, syntactic, textual, pragmatic. This is best exemplified, for
instance, in Baker’s (1992/2011) all-time popular textbook In Other Words.
There is nothing inherently wrong with this linguistics-based approach to
translation pedagogy, except for its assumption that translation problems
are meant to be either solved or, if all else fails, circumvented to the best
of the translator’s ability. To my mind, this perspective is the consequence
of a deeply embedded metaphorical thinking about issues arising from
translation. In this context, I prefer the word ‘issue’, as opposed to the
word ‘problem’, because the latter word (which, admittedly, has appeared
at various points throughout my own writing as well) implies the possibil-
ity and indeed the necessity of a (textual) resolution. There is no doubt
that the Translation Issues are Obstacles metaphor pervades
mainstream thinking about translation and translating, to the extent that
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150 Chapter 5
when viable solutions do not come by, the entire communicative event is
seen to have failed.
What if the underlying conceptual metaphor that governs our thinking
about translation were changed to Translation Issues are Windows
to Intercultural Communication? This certainly does not sound
logical at first, for why would ‘issues’, in the sense of ‘problems’, facilitate
‘communication’? The obsession to overcome barriers in cross-lingual
transfer will continue to dominate the typical translation classroom. We
can, however, supplement such pedagogy, essentially oriented around the
problem-solution dyad, with the notion of untranslatability as a given. Seen
as such, textual and interpretive issues arising from translating can become
useful tools, through which students can be trained to recognise the kinds
of incommensurability that obtain between and among dif ferent languages
and cultures. For instance, in the case of bilingual source texts, instead
of debating over the ‘best’ strategy in rendering code-switched segments
into the target text, students can be invited to think more deeply about
the implications of the paradox of the code (see Chapter 2). Beyond the
technicalities, what is it that makes the transposition of an English segment
embedded within a Chinese ST into an English TT paradoxical? How do
we see this textual problem in light of the power relations between the two
languages in a given sociolinguistic context (in our case, Singapore)? To
what extent can we engage the cultural Other through translation? What
do the issues arising from interpreting translated texts tell us about the
heterogeneity of cultures?
Questions such as these provide platforms for drawing connections
between literary translating and the broader cultural and ideological
contexts. This approach locates the teaching of translation within the
larger umbrella of cross-cultural communication, and has the advantage
of prompting students to think more critically and macroscopically about
what is usually perceived as a text-based transfer of meaning. The point,
however, is not simply about learning how cross-cultural communication
can be realised, although that could well be part of the relevant curriculum.
A primary goal of instruction should be to inculcate the idea that insofar as
cross-cultural communication is possible and desirable it is not always ten-
able. In other words, the teaching of translation should not solely revolve
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Conclusion 151
around the resolution of linguistic-cultural dif ferences. Equal (dare we

say greater) emphasis should be placed on how translation, and therefore
cross-cultural communication, may sometimes be undermined by linguistic
and cultural heterogeneity. An emphasis on heterogeneity does not at all
mitigate translation as a meaningful enterprise. Rather, only by exposing
students to the sometimes illusory nature of linguistic and cultural homo-
geneity can a realistic and balanced view of translation and intercultural
communication be possible.
Up to this point we have been using the terms ‘cross-cultural com-
munication’ and ‘intercultural communication’ rather interchangeably,
with the former appearing at a higher frequency. There is a subtle but
important dif ference though. While cross-cultural communication refers
more generally to the study of ‘how people from dif ferent cultures and
dif ferent countries act, communicate and make sense of the world around
them’, intercultural communication involves ‘complex interactions between
members of dif ferent linguistic, cultural and ethnic groups’ (Cheung 2010).
While cross-cultural communication is a broader category, intercultural
communication is conceivably more dif ficult to attain, as it entails not a
passive understanding of the Other but an interactive dynamic between lan-
guages and cultures. This distinction is best illustrated by our case study in
Chapter 4, where a unilateral translation model (i.e. where mother tongue
languages are translated into English) would manifest cross-cultural com-
munication and a multilateral translation model (i.e. where all languages
translate into one another) would come closer to realising intercultural
communication.
An understanding of translational issues as an inherent property in
inter/cross-cultural communication rather than barriers to be overcome
will help us appreciate the fact that there is not always a convenient bridge
from one language to another. The spirit of translation is then not only
to create possible connections but also to uncover chasms that will always
remain unfilled. These chasms serve to remind us that cultural determin-
ism should be stoically resisted, that the cultural Other may not always
be discursively representable in the terms of the Self. They point to the
need for us to develop an interactive mode of understanding the Other,
by af fording a voice to the Other rather than merely attempt to represent
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152 Chapter 5
it, and also by allowing the Other to represent the Self. It is through this
complex dialectic that translation can raise its profile from a mere under-
standing of dif ferences, that is, as a tool in cross-cultural communication,
to a dynamic platform that enables interplay of dif ferences in a search for
dialogic, intercultural communication.
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Index
abusive fidelity 73 Baopuzi 51

alterity 44, 45, 46, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 78, Bassnett, Susan 20
100 Benjamin, Walter 73
see also Other Berman, Antoine 44, 45n3, 57, 71–4, 98
Anderson, Benedict 9 Betz, Maurice 45n3
anglophobia 18, 52, 55, 56, 63, 64, 67–8, Bhabha, Homi 65, 145
78–9, 82, 84, 85 Blommaert, Jan 36
anglophilia 78–9n1, 83, 84, 85 Bokhorst-Heng, Wendy 17
anthologies Bourdieu, Pierre 16, 19, 107
Droplets 1–2, 67, 70, 75–6, 79, 82, 102 bridge (as metaphor) 101, 112, 114, 119,
The Fiction of Singapore 114–17, 128, 134, 142, 149, 151
130, 136
Home and Away 133–5, 137 Casanova, Pascale 58, 106, 107, 113, 138–9
Journeys 121–4, 128, 130, 136 Chan, Leo 77–8, 99
KIV 29, 41 Chineseness 3, 10n6, 31, 74, 78, 79n1, 94,
Looking In, Looking Out 133–4, 137 95, 99, 101, 146
Memories and Desires 124–7, 128, Choo Teck Song 79
130, 136 CMIO (Chinese, Malay, Indian, Others)
The Poetry of Singapore 111–13, 114– 8
15, 118, 121, 122, 123, 128, 130, 136 confrontational bilingualism 37
Rhythms 127, 133, 135, 136 crisis of representation 67, 146, 149
Ties That Bind 133–4, 137 Cronin, Michael 111, 113, 116, 140, 145
Unity in Diversity 131–2, 137 cross-lingual practice 7, 56, 146, 148
Voices 4 117–21, 128, 130, 136 Culler, Jonathan 2
Voices of Singapore 117–21, 128, 130,
136 Davis, Kathleen 102
Words for the 25th 117–21, 128, 130, deconstruction 100
136 Derrida, Jacques 90, 102
Aw Guat Poh 41 dialects 3, 8n4, 14–15, 53, 107
directionality 25, 28, 57, 59, 64, 65, 68,
back-translation 48, 148 108–9, 113, 115, 122, 133–5, 137,
Baker, Mona 21, 149 140, 148
Bakhtin, Mikhail 35, 55 domestication 22, 49, 71, 73, 100
Bandia, Paul 66 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 22n8
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English-knowing bilingualism 13, 134 intertextuality 38–40, 44, 49

epistemological dilemma/problem 25, 27, intratextuality 49
69, 71, 73, 74, 84, 88, 90, 92, 95,
97, 98–102, 147 Jones, D.G. 38
equivalence 58, 70, 147, 149
dynamic equivalence 89, 95 Kachru, Braj 13
ethics 57, 69, 71–2, 74, 73, 98, 147 Kan Hua / The Painting 86–92
ethnocentrism 71–2, 100 Kuo Pao Kun 58–9, 61–6, 68
Even-Zohar, Itamar 106
Lalonde, Michèle 37
Fawcett, Peter 21 language:
foreignisation 54n5, 73 ideology of 7, 8, 11, 16, 17, 18–19, 24,
27, 34, 37, 38, 52, 56–7, 58, 65–6,
Gadamer, Hans-Georg 21 68, 69, 70, 73, 74, 82, 85, 87, 88,
Genette, Gerard 109–10 92, 112, 119, 124, 126, 128, 130, 141,
Grutman, Rainier 33, 37, 57, 58, 67, 106 143, 146, 148
Guji de lian/A Lonely Face 92–8 policy and planning 1, 6, 8, 12–14,
17
habitus 20 Lao Jiu 59–66
Halliday, M.A.K. 38 law of growing standardisation 63
hanyu pinyin 30, 32, 33, 34, 46 law of interference 64
Hatim, Basil 38–40, 43 Lee Hsien Loong 17
Heartlander-Cosmopolitan Divide 4n2, Lee Kuan Yew 12
11 Lefevere, André 20, 130
Hermans, Theo 20 Liang Wern Fook 29
heteroglossia 35, 54 Lin Gao 86
heterolingualism 24, 27, 29, 34, 35, 37, Lindsay, Jennifer 142
45n3, 57, 66, 68, 106, 110 lingua franca 9, 16, 65, 112
Ho, Elaine Y.L. 145 literalism 72
Hokenson, Jan 58, 64 littérisation 107, 138
Humboldt, Wilhelm von 71
hybridity 23, 24, 37, 45, 53, 55, 62, 65, Magic Mountain, The 45n3
68 Manipulation School 20–1
hypothetical reader 27, 77, 78, 98 Mann, Thomas 45n3
Mason, Ian 38–40, 43
idiolects 39 medium of instruction 4–5n2, 9, 12–13,
In Other Words 149 145
indexicality 24, 32, 40, 45–6, 50, 67, 82, metonymy 20, 53, 55, 60, 67, 115, 127
83, 100, 146 Meylaerts, Reine 55
intentionality 38–9 Mezei, Kathy 37, 55, 83
interliminality 58, 64, 65, 68 Michael ‘Yang’ 46
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Index 165
Ming Pao Monthly 1 Shahua 80

Ministry of Education 15 Shaw, George Bernard 39
morphosyllabicity 48 Shizhong yinzhe/ Invisibility 51–7, 67
motif of loss 1, 3, 5, 6, 12, 32, 55, 66, Simpson, Andrew 16
69–70, 74, 78, 98, 99, 147 Singapore Colloquial Chinese 54
Munday, Jeremy 21 Singapore Colloquial English see Singlish
Munson, Marcella 58, 64 Singapore Writers’ Association 1
Singlish 54, 62
Nantah see Nanyang University sinophilia 78–9, 82, 83, 85, 100
Nanyang University 11, 93–4, 96 sinophobia 79n1, 84, 85
National Arts Council 127 skopos 74, 89
National Institute of Education 131–2 social semiotics 27, 34, 38–41, 45–6, 54,
National Library Board 133 56, 62, 66, 146
National University of Singapore 1, 29, sociolect 39, 57
117 Speak Mandarin Campaign 14, 15, 16, 17
naturalisation see domestication Speak White 37–8, 67, 83
negative bilingualism see confrontational sway 21–2
bilingualism symbolic capital 16, 17, 19, 63, 65, 66, 83,
No Parking on Odd Days/ Danri buke 106, 107, 108, 122, 123, 124, 127,
tingche 59–66 128, 138, 139, 140, 141, 148
symbolic power see symbolic capital
Pakir, Anne 8
paratexts 24, 26, 33, 49, 91, 109–11, 115, tagging 39–40
116, 124, 132, 134 Tan, Eugene 4n2
polysystems 19, 105, 106, 107, 109, 113, third space 65, 145
127 To the Lighthouse 99
positionality 70, 109, 111 Toury, Gideon 63
postcolonialism 66, 69 transcreation 128, 130
Pygmalion 39 translatability 99, 148
untranslatability 26, 49, 68, 146,
Quah Sy Ren 51, 53, 62, 64n6 148–50
Québécois 37 translation model
many-to-many/multilateral 128–9,
registers 35, 40, 53, 54, 62, 73 133, 141, 148, 151
rewriting 20, 22, 130 non-translation 105, 131–2, 141
Robinson, Douglas 21–2 one-to-one/unilateral 128–9, 135,
140, 141, 151
St André, James 5, 52, 53, 54 transliteration 48
Schleiermacher, Friedrich 71, 73 Tymoczko, Maria 131
self-othering 74, 92, 98, 147
self-translation 57–8, 64–8 Unipress 116
Tong King Lee - 978-3-0353-0459-6

via Helena Santiago
166 Index
Venuti, Lawrence 22n8, 71–4, 100 Xi Ni Er 1

visibility 28, 106, 107, 108, 109, 113, 116, Xiangchou/ Homesickness 41–6
122, 128, 138, 139, 140, 142, 148
Youth Book Company (Qingnian shuju)
Wee, Lionel 9, 17 1
Wong Meng Voon 46 Yuyeji/ Stormy Night 79–83, 91
Woolf, Virginia 99
Tong King Lee - 978-3-0353-0459-6

via Helena Santiago
New Trends in Translation Studies
In today’s globalised society, translation and interpreting are gaining vis-
ibility and relevance as a means to foster communication and dialogue
in increasingly multicultural and multilingual environments. Practised
since time immemorial, both activities have become more complex
and multifaceted in recent decades, intersecting with many other disci-
plines. New Trends in Translation Studies is an international series with
the main objectives of promoting the scholarly study of translation and
interpreting and of functioning as a forum for the translation and inter-
preting research community.
This series publishes research on subjects related to multimedia transla-

tion and interpreting, in their various social roles. It is primarily intended
to engage with contemporary issues surrounding the new multidimen-
sional environments in which translation is flourishing, such as audio-
visual media, the internet and emerging new media and technologies.
It sets out to reflect new trends in research and in the profession, to
encourage flexible methodologies and to promote interdisciplinary
research ranging from the theoretical to the practical and from the
applied to the pedagogical.
New Trends in Translation Studies publishes translation- and interpreting-

oriented books that present high-quality scholarship in an accessible,
reader-friendly manner. The series embraces a wide range of publi
cations – monographs, edited volumes, conference proceedings and
translations of works in translation studies which do not exist in English.
The editor, Dr Jorge Díaz Cintas, welcomes proposals from all those
interested in being involved with the series. The working language of the
series is English, although in exceptional circumstances works in other
languages can be considered for publication. Proposals dealing with
specialised translation, translation tools and technology, audiovisual
translation and the field of accessibility to the media are particularly
welcomed.
Tong King Lee - 978-3-0353-0459-6

via Helena Santiago
Vol. 1 Meng Ji: Phraseology in Corpus-Based Translation Studies
251 pages. 2010. ISBN 978-3-03911-550-1
Vol. 2 Josu Barambones Zubiria: Mapping the Dubbing Scene:

Audiovisual Translation in Basque Television
191 pages. 2012. ISBN 978-3-0343-0281-4
Vol. 3 Elisa Ghia: Subtitling Matters: New Perspectives on Subtitling and

Foreign Language Learning
234 pages. 2012. ISBN 978-3-0343-0843-4
Vol. 4 Anabel Borja Albi and Fernando Prieto Ramos (eds): Legal
Translation in Context: Professional Issues and Prospects
325 pages. 2013. ISBN 978-3-0343-0284-5
Vol. 5 Kieran O’Driscoll: Retranslation through the Centuries:

Jules Verne in English
302 pages. 2011. ISBN 978-3-0343-0236-4
Vol. 6 Federico M. Federici (ed.): Translating Dialects and Languages of

Minorities: Challenges and Solutions
245 pages. 2011. ISBN 978-3-0343-0178-7
Vol. 7 Silvia Bruti and Elena Di Giovanni (eds): Audiovisual Translation

across Europe: An Ever-changing Landscape
289 pages. 2012. ISBN 978-3-0343-0953-0
Vol. 8 Tong-King Lee: Translating the Multilingual City: Cross-lingual

Practices and Language Ideology
176 pages. 2013. ISBN 978-3-0343-0850-2
Vol. 9 Laura Incalcaterra McLoughlin, Marie Biscio and Máire Áine Ní

Mhainnín (eds): Audiovisual Translation. Subtitles and Subtitling:
Theory and Practice
301 pages. 2011. ISBN 978-3-0343-0299-9
Vol. 10 Xiaohui Yuan: Politeness and Audience Response in

Chinese–English Subtitling
250 pages. 2012. ISBN 978-3-0343-0732-1
Vol. 11 Isabel García-Izquierdo and Esther Monzó (eds): Iberian Studies

on Translation and Interpreting
401 pages. 2012. ISBN 978-3-0343-0815-1
Tong King Lee - 978-3-0353-0459-6
via Helena Santiago

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New Tr e n d s in Tr an s l at i on Stud i e s New Trends in Tra ns lat io n St udies

Translation is a textual and discursive practice embedded in competing

Tong-King Lee • Translating the Multilingual City

Tong-King Lee is an assistant professor in translation at the University of

Tong King Lee - 978-3-0353-0459-6

Translation is a textual and discursive practice embedded in competing

Tong-King Lee • Translating the Multilingual City

Tong-King Lee is an assistant professor in translation at the University of

Tong King Lee - 978-3-0353-0459-6

Tong King Lee - 978-3-0353-0459-6

Tong King Lee - 978-3-0353-0459-6

Tong King Lee - 978-3-0353-0459-6

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013932943

© Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern 2013

All rights reserved.

Tong King Lee - 978-3-0353-0459-6

List of Figures and Tables vii

Tong King Lee - 978-3-0353-0459-6

Figure 1 Schematic representation of the translation relation

Table 1 Pragmatic functions of the English language in Singapore 10

Tong King Lee - 978-3-0353-0459-6

This book is the culmination of a sustained course of thinking about

Tong King Lee - 978-3-0353-0459-6

Tong King Lee - 978-3-0353-0459-6

Language Ideological Relations and the Problem

The motif of loss in contemporary Singapore Chinese

Tong King Lee - 978-3-0353-0459-6

Tong King Lee - 978-3-0353-0459-6

bearing in mind that ‘Chinese-speaking Chinese’ is foregrounded here as

Tong King Lee - 978-3-0353-0459-6

sub-communities of Chinese Singaporeans with competing linguistic af fili-

Tong King Lee - 978-3-0353-0459-6

up to empirical testing, though, is really beside the point. As mentioned,

have a tendency to reify a timeless ‘Chinese culture’ which Singaporean Chinese

Within the literary corpus studied in St André’s research, Chinese is a cul-

Tong King Lee - 978-3-0353-0459-6

I shall return to this motif in subsequent chapters with concrete exam-

Translation studies in Singapore

In asking these questions, I seek to address cultural identity and language

3 For a comprehensive list of bibliographic sources on language-related (specifically,

Tong King Lee - 978-3-0353-0459-6

The sociolinguistics of Singapore, with special emphasis on

In diglossic and polyglossic societies, the relation among various lan-

Tong King Lee - 978-3-0353-0459-6

case in Singapore, an ethnically and linguistically diverse society whose

Tong King Lee - 978-3-0353-0459-6

Tong King Lee - 978-3-0353-0459-6

Table 1: Pragmatic functions of the English language in Singapore*

Assumption about English Function of English

(1) National Level: international

(3) Community Level: inter-ethnic

In contrast, the Chinese language, as well as the other mother tongue

Tong King Lee - 978-3-0353-0459-6

Table 2: Functional polarisation of Mandarin Chinese and English in Singapore*

Mandarin Chinese English

mother-tongue business; economics

cultural-ballast science; technology

cultural identity education

intra-ethnic communication; (ethnic) unity inter-ethnic communication

* Adapted from Bokhorst-Heng (1999a: 7).

By virtue of its pragmatic functions, the English language has taken

Tong King Lee - 978-3-0353-0459-6

By labelling a sub-community of Chinese Singaporeans as the ‘hard core