Article,
Different Times, different Translations – Translation of Notices in Hong Kong
Babel, (2013)
Abstract
Given that texts are embedded in complex historical, cultural and linguistic contexts, the changing political and social environments of Hong Kong over the last century have inevitably had an important bearing on the use of the language in translated texts. Hong Kong transformed from a barren fishing village ceded as a colony to the British in the mid-nineteenth century into an international city as it was returned to the Chinese in the late twentieth century. Chinese, the language of the colonized who were predominantly Chinese people, had been dismissed as insignificant before it came to be on a par with English in importance in the last two decades of the colonial era. This article endeavors to show how sociohistorical factors have governed the use of Chinese in the translation of two kinds of notices, one published in The Hong Kong Government Gazette and the other posted in public places. Drawing on bilingual samples of these notices, it will examine how English notices conveying a similar message but written in different periods of the history of Hong Kong have been translated into Chinese and whether the translations are acceptable to the receivers of the target texts. But first, a brief description of the language policy of Hong Kong is in order
