Chan - Translating Bilinguality. Theorizing Translation in thePost-Babelian Era

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Translating Bilinguality
a
Leo Tak-Hung Chan
a
Lingnan University, Hong Kong
Published online: 21 Feb 2014.
To cite this article: Leo Tak-Hung Chan (2002) Translating Bilinguality, The Translator, 8:1, 49-72, DOI:
10.1080/13556509.2002.10799116
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The Translator. Volume 8, Number 1 (2002), 49-72
Translating Bilinguality
Theorizing Translation in the Post-Babelian Era
LEO TAK-HUNG CHAN

Lingnan University, Hong Kong
Abstract. Translation is often defined as interlingual transfer, with
correspondences sought between two languages. But what if the
original text is written in more than one language? This paper
Downloaded by [Newcastle University] at 01:29 20 December 2014
addresses a number of situations where bilinguality impacts on

the translation process and problematizes conventional concepts
of translation. Several categories of examples are discussed. The
first of these involves texts (by Tolstoy and Hemingway) into which
isolated stretches of a second language are incorporated. Then
there are fictional works where a second language is extensively
deployed, but already translated for the reader. Examples are works
by Buck, Clavell and Maugham, where Chinese characters are
made to speak English and the novelists have to play the role of
translators. Finally, there are ‘postmodern’ texts wherein the
author inhabits, as it were, two linguistic realms: those of his or
her mother tongue and the acquired tongue. The discussion here
will revolve around two distinct groups of writers: those who are
competent in more than one language and blend the features of
two or more languages in their work (like James Joyce) and those
who are proficient in one language but have ‘mother-tongue’
knowledge about another (like Maxine Hong Kingston). A close
examination of works by the last category of writers in translation
reveals the limits of existing translation theories which are based
on a bilingual, one-to-one model and which do not take into
consideration features of ‘interlinguality’ and ‘intralinguality’
within texts.
In an essay anthologized in The Transparent Eye, Eugene Eoyang enunci-

ated his conception of three phases in the history of mankind which have
different implications for the role and function of translation (1993:4-9).1
There is a pre-Babelian phase, with an originary language spoken by all; a
Babelian phase, with a multiplicity of tongues among which the translator
seeks to build bridges; and a post-Babelian phase, where a great number of
people would have facility in more than one language, though translating
would continue to be an important activity. It is arguable whether the post-
Babelian phase has begun long ago, considering the massive multilinguality
ISSN 1355-6509 © St Jerome Publishing, Manchester

50 Translating Bilinguality
of literary culture in the classical and medieval traditions of the West, as well
as the linguistic multiplicity of African and American Indian oral traditions.
The fact, however, remains clear that multilinguality, rather than simple
bilinguality, has now become globally dominant, and will become increas-
ingly sought after, so that we cannot but acknowledge the fact that we are
definitely in the third phase.2 Rather than hastily conclude that translation
will cease to play as dominant a part as it had hitherto, given the increase in
the number of those who can do without translations into certain languages,
perhaps we could do well to ask: How will translation fare in a new era
where we have a firmer grasp of the profusion of tongues?
Translation theorists have not been altogether uninterested in the issue of
how to translate an original that is already linguistically pluralized, although

for centuries most theorizing has centered around the translation of monolin-
gual texts. When more readers as well as writers are likely to be at least
bilingual, and translators have to accept and adapt to the new linguistic envi-
ronment, translation theory cannot but be radically transformed. It is not as if
translators in the past have never had to confront texts in more than one lan-
guage; what is apparent is that these will become more and more the rule
rather than the exception. As in many other realms of academic inquiry,
Jacques Derrida was the first to raise in 1985 the question that is highly per-
tinent for today’s translation theorists (in his seminal essay ‘Des Tours de
Babel’): “How is a text written in several languages at a time to be trans-
lated?” (1985a:171). However, serious consideration of the issue, other than
as a translation problem to be solved, is still lacking in the literature.
The coexistence of two or more languages in the same text (as distin-
guished from the presence of one language in another, which I intend to
address below) is a notable phenomenon in literature past and present. This
is especially so in fiction, which for Mikhail Bakhtin is “heteroglossic”. Nev-
ertheless, more attention has been devoted to the examination of the diversity
of social speech types in the novel than to the diversity of languages. For
Bakhtin, “The actively literary linguistic consciousness at all times and eve-
rywhere (that is, in all epochs of literature historically available to us) comes
upon ‘languages’, and not language” (1981:295). Bakhtin thus stresses the
dialogic interplay of languages (as much as sociolects), each of which repre-
sents a specific point of view on the world. If it is this polyphonic feature that
contributes to the success of the novel – as opposed to poetic writing – as a
genre, then clearly translators ignore this at their peril.
Probably the only scholar who has offered an extensive discussion of the
issue of translating texts containing a foreign language (or even languages)
is Meir Sternberg, who provides a most convenient point of departure. His
article ‘Polylingualism as Reality and Translation as Mimesis’, which ap-
peared some twenty years ago, seeks through a study of possible approaches
to translating these texts to arrive at a theory of “translational mimesis” that
Leo Tak-hung Chan 51
is at variance with the traditional theoretical emphasis on formal and seman-

tic replication (Sternberg 1981).3 In confronting the challenge to represent
(not reproduce) in one language the polylinguality of another, Sternberg says
the translator can either use one language and exclude interlingual tensions
(he calls this “referential restriction”), or employ one language “artificially
coupled with a polylingual tenor” (“homogenizing convention”), or resort to
more than one language in order to replicate the polylingual diversity of the
original (“vehicular matching”). This can be presented in schematic form
(slightly adapted from Sternberg’s model) in this way:
Referential Homogenizing Vehicular

restriction convention matching
Object Unilingual Polylingual Polylingual
Medium Unilingual Unilingual Polylingual
The present essay attempts to explore the implications of this model, which
by no means leaves everything accounted for, by surveying various catego-
ries of so-called multilingual texts from the 20th century as they have been
translated into Chinese. Bearing in mind the three strategic ‘poles’, which
range from a strictly monolingual, through a modified monolingual, to a multi-
lingual presentation, I will proceed to look at a full array of textual possibilities
– as well as problems – presented to the translator of our time. Indeed, be-
cause languages can be co-present in one and the same text in an amazing
variety of configurations (though for simplicity’s sake I will identify only
four), the strategies for dealing with them will also be manifold. While re-
stricting myself to Chinese examples, the hope is that the analysis can have
demonstrated relevance to translations in languages other than Chinese. A
significant aspect of my focus will also be the success of the translators’
strategies, in terms of how they have been received by readers.
1. Translating two tongues
The deployment of a second language in literary and non-literary texts – one

form of code-switching according to sociolinguists – is a phenomenon more
prevalent than is generally presumed. A most notable example is Leo Tolstoy’s
incorporation of long passages in French as spoken by the protagonists in
some versions of his War and Peace. What he did can be understood as the-
matically significant since French was the language of the educated class in
Russia ever since Catherine the Great encouraged its study. In the two major
English translations of this novel (Garnett 1904, Edmonds 1957), the French
portions are treated rather differently. In contrast to the earlier and, for many,
authoritative version by Constance Garnett, the translator Rosemary Edmonds
retains a greater number of phrases and expressions in their original French
(that is, using the so-called strategy of ‘non-translation’). The words with
which Edmonds begins her translation, “Eh bien, mon prince”, are translated
as “Well, prince” in Garnett’s. In the conversations that are reported in the
first two sections of the novel alone, epithets in French like “chère amie”
(Edmonds, p. 4, “dear friend” in Garnett), “des imbèciles” (similarly trans-
lated in Garnett) and “attendez” (p. 8, “wait” in Garnett) are quite prominent
and, together with statements like “Que voulez-vous” (p. 6/7, “What would
you have” in Garnett) and “Soyez tranquille” (p. 9, “never mind” in Garnett),
they suggest an attempt to remind the reader that French is being spoken.
Nevertheless, one cannot overlook the fact that a considerable proportion
of the verbal exchanges in French are still rendered into English in Rose-
mary Edmonds’ version, and the written note in French that Annette Schere
sends to Anna Pavlovna (1957:5) is also translated into English. The overall
effect of Edmonds’ translation is more ‘bilingual’ than Garnett’s – although,
because Garnett also incorporates some French words from the original text,
both translators pursue an approach of selective translation. With regard to
Schere’s note, which Garnett reproduces in English without even adding that
it was “written in French” (as Edmonds does), it can fairly be said that, on
the whole, Garnett cares little for the bilingual reality presented in these first
pages of the novel. Even if readers have not been presented with a sealed
monolingual world, it is clear that they are often not told the significance of a
foreign language for the human activities being described. Fortunately, Garnett
has translated the passing reference to “that elaborately choice French, in
which our forefathers not only spoke but thought” (1904:5), so that we do
get the impression that the foreign language is functionally equivalent to a
sociolect, registering the social class of its speakers. Unfortunately, though,
the readers are told about, not shown, the reality presented in Tolstoy’s novel.4
Two Chinese translations of War and Peace can be similarly compared,
especially as one of them (Liu Liaoyi’s rendition, 1989) is separated from
the other (Tong Xiliang’s, 1958) by a long span of thirty-one years. On the
face of it, Liu takes pains to leave the French segments untranslated in the
Chinese text, whereas Tong works consciously toward producing a pure,
unadulterated Chinese version containing no French at all, and only scant
references to the language. Tong’s concern that a monolingual version be
produced reveals his overall ‘naturalizing’ or simplifying tendency; he even
goes so far as to translate official documents in Russian into classical Chi-
nese (1958:534-35). However, lest one should think that Liu’s translation is
decidedly the more faithful of the two (since it renders the French and Rus-
sian ‘voices’ and more concretely represents the linguistic situations
described), it is worth looking more closely at Book 3, Part 2 (August 1812),

Section 6 of the novel, in which Chinese (the target language) and French
(transposed from the original) are sharply juxtaposed (see Liu 1989:147-52;
Tong 1958:538-40).
Essentially three characters are involved in this brief section, which narrates
how Napoleon interrogates a captive Cossack named Lavrushka, captured as
the French army encroaches upon Moscow. The interrogation is conducted
with the help of an interpreter, Lelorgne d’Ideville, who at two points at least
manipulates the information provided by the Cossack to cater to Napoleon’s
vanity:
“We know, you’ve got your Bonaparte, aye, and he’s beaten every-
body in the world; but we’re of a different kidney…” The interpreter
translated these words without the conclusion, and Bonaparte smiled.
(Edmonds 1957:845)
In this kind of situation, obviously one would argue for a bilingual rendition,
for otherwise much of the comedy will be lost, as will the insights into Napo-
leon’s character. But complications arise because of the abundance of French
used, and because of the intrusive remarks by the French historian Thiers
who is recounting the events from quite a different perspective from the nar-
rator’s. Looking at Liu’s translation, we can in fact distinguish seven levels
of language use:
(1) The omniscient narrator uses Russian (translated into Chinese);

(2) The French historian Thiers reports in French (untranslated, quoted
by the narrator);
(3) Napoleon speaks in French (untranslated);
(4) The interpreter speaks in French (untranslated) to Napoleon, but uses
Russian (translated into Chinese) with Lavrushka;
(5) Lavrushka speaks in Russian (rendered into Chinese);
(6) Napoleon’s chief-of-staff (Berthier) speaks in Russian (Chinese); and
(7) Footnotes in Chinese explaining the French words and passages.
On the whole, although it leaves readers in a liminal zone where the trans-
lator can step in and interpret for them the languages used (including those of
Napoleon’s interpreter), the Tong translation is more readily comprehensi-
ble, and hence more effective. At the very least, readers do not have to wrestle
with the two languages, forcing themselves to imagine that the Chinese they
are reading is actually Russian in the original, nor refer repeatedly to the very
abundant – and, for some, annoying – footnotes. For example, the Liu trans-
lation contains a total of 18 footnotes (the longest running to five lines) in
less than five pages. And French appears in 31 of the 100 lines making up
this section.
The treatment of this passage by Rosemary Edmonds also contrasts sharply

with that by Constance Garnett. Edmonds translates everything into English,
but italicizes all that is in French in the original (1957:843-46). Garnett uses
English throughout, except for phrases by Thiers and by Napoleon: “sur cet
enfant du Don” (1904:771, “this child of the Don”) and “un oiseau qu’on
rend aux champs qui l’ont vu naître” (ibid.:771, “like a bird one restores to
its native fields”). It seems difficult to lay down hard and fast rules as to what
ought to be done with passages where bilinguality or trilinguality is a key
feature. Yet such a situation as I have discussed here in relation to War and
Peace is not rare at all, and other instances that are more complicated, or less
so, can be easily cited. Consider, for instance, Hemingway’s use of Spanish
in The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls, his use of Italian in A
Farewell to Arms (and much else) – and the various problems these pose for
the translator.
2. Translating the translated
The above scenario will be further complicated when one of the languages in
the bilingual reality portrayed in the literary text happens to be the transla-
tor’s target language. Think of the difficult choices facing the French translator
when rendering the French passages in War and Peace. Should the translator
transpose these into the translation, search for a third language that is an
analogous marker of status in French society (if that exists), or use a combi-
nation of French (or this third language) and footnotes? A further twist to
this bewildering situation occurs when the source text chooses not to repre-
sent the foreign language and practically erases it by translating it into the
author’s tongue in the first place, as in the following examples.
2.1 Pearl S. Buck as ‘translator’
There is a conspicuous tradition of fictional works in English depicting lives

of the Chinese in China, which is relevant to the present discussion. In terms
of popularity in this genre, probably the most outstanding is Pearl Buck, with
her novels of peasant life in the thirties and forties. Her characters think and
talk in English, as it were: an example is Wang Long, the hero of her best
known work The Good Earth (1931), a chronicle of the lives of a farmer, his
wife and their sons. To facilitate Western readers’ understanding of a China
that valorizes conservative Confucian values, Pearl Buck completely natu-
ralizes the conversations in the story, supposedly carried on in Chinese –
Wang Long speaks impeccable English. The linguistic peculiarities of the
characters’ speeches are also not highlighted; the author appears to be re-
porting exactly what is said (in English). And while readers of today cannot
miss the fact that Pearl Buck’s perspective is Western, her sympathy for the
Chinese is everywhere evident, and this is shown in the tone of the narrator,
who observes the events in the Wang household from a distance. All this is
embodied in Pearl Buck’s language of narration which, as Jonathan Spence
has noted, is “curious and stilted”, “a modified form of the style found in the
King James version of the Bible” (Spence 1990:101).5 It is, in effect, a
(supra)language that exists outside the specific time and place of the novel.
Because of Buck’s erasure of distinguishing features of the reported lan-
guage (Chinese) as well as the absence of a localized and localizable narrator’s
voice, the Chinese translator’s job becomes restricted to the realm of verbal
transfer; no cultural translation is necessary. Despite a few awkward expres-
sions here and there (like “another mouth” in the example below), Zhong
Wen can virtually pass his The Good Earth off as a make-believe Chinese
original.6 The (Chinese) reader of the translation is as much at home with the
translation as the (English) reader of the original can be with Pearl Buck’s,
which is after all a ‘naturalized’ translation in itself. The following are some
examples of the naturalization technique of Pearl Buck, all from the mouth
of Wang Long:
“You know I am not rich. I have the five mouths to feed now and my
father is old and does not work, and still he eats, and another mouth
is being born in my house at this very moment, for aught I know.”
(1931:58; italics added)
“If I have a handful of silver it is because I work and my wife works,

and we do not, as some do, sit idling over a gambling-table or gossip-
ing on doorsteps never swept, letting the fields grow to weeds and
our children go half-fed!” (1931:59)
“I am no longer young and it is not necessary for me to work since I

have men on my land and my sons and peace in my house.” (1931:269)
Despite traces of an attempt to remind readers that Chinese is being spoken,

Pearl Buck, the author-translator, generally aims at giving her reader a ‘flu-
ent’ rendition. At the same time, through her use of the naturalization strategy,
she clearly makes her readers feel close to her characters. And yet Buck’s
methods are by no means ubiquitously adopted by other writers of the same
genre. For instance, Somerset Maugham (said to be slightly antagonistic to-
ward the Chinese) either rarely represents his Chinese characters in
conversation, or hardly ever translates what they say in Chinese into English
– for an example, see The Painted Veil (1925). For the translator of The
Good Earth then, there is a need only to ensure that the style disappears and
the content remains: the translator’s job is simply one of back-translating,
and an undemanding kind at that.
2.2 Clavell, Malraux and Maugham
We can look even further afield for examples. In the category of Western
fiction about Chinese interacting with Europeans (or non-Chinese) in which
bilinguality is more clearly foregrounded, we have the best-selling popular
fiction of James Clavell, whose Tai-pan (1966) brilliantly captures the inter-
twining relationship between the Chinese and the British in colonial Hong
Kong, as well as novels about China by André Malraux like Le condition
humaine (Man’s Estate; 1933). In Tai-pan, Gordon Chen, bastard-son of the
tycoon Straun, has a Chinese mother who speaks like this to him – though
she is from a lower class background (1966:25):
The Tai-pan is your father. He gave you life. He is my god. He bought

me for himself, then blessed me by selling me to Chen Sheng as wife.
Why should Chen Sheng take a woman with an impure two-year-old
son as wife when he could buy a thousand virgins if it wasn’t because
the Tai-pan wanted it so?
In much the same way, the revolutionaries who planned a Communist

uprising in Shanghai in 1927 – including Tchen, Katow, and Kyo – carry on
a perfectly normal conversation in the first chapter of Le condition humaine
in French, though one of them is Chinese and another is Russian (1946:16-
20)! There is considerable difference between these works and those of Pearl
Buck with respect to their implications for translation. While both categories
are monolingual texts – and hence apparently more manageable than Tolstoy’s
War and Peace as discussed above – novels like Pearl Buck’s delineate a
reality in a language other than the one in which it is captured by those who
experience or describe it, while those of Malraux and Clavell portray basi-
cally a bilingual (or even trilingual) reality, with one (or two) of the languages
in question already translated.
In contrast to Pearl Buck’s ‘naturalization’ strategy, novelists of the latter
category often resort to the literalist method (using Chinglish) when present-
ing the English speeches of Chinese characters. For instance, the owner of
the curio-shop where Kitty and Charlie, the ‘fated lovers’ in The Painted
Veil, have their secret rendezvous says: “Mr. Townsend no come yet. You
go top-side, yes?” (Maugham 1925:56) This literalist method, of course, has
acquired labels in the field of translation studies as varied as ‘exoticization’
and ‘foreignization’.7 Through such linguistic manipulation, Maugham shows
the Chinese to be strange and incomprehensible, in stark contrast to the
strange-yet-familiar Buck characters in The Good Earth as well as her many
other novels located in China. Overall, of course, Maugham pays very lim-
ited attention to the Chinese locals, with an overwhelming majority of them
going nameless (and given epithets like ‘Chinaman’, ‘Chinese laundryman’,
‘Chinese doctor’, ‘Chinese convert’, and so on), and this contrasts sharply
with the sympathy bestowed by Pearl Buck upon similar characters in her
works. This sympathy is reflected most precisely in the effort she has made
to ‘translate’ what they say into English.
Some rather anomalous features, then, emerge when we compare these
two categories of fiction (represented by Buck on the one hand, and Maugham
on the other) as translated into Chinese, the language of some or all of the
characters in the original. In particular, the implications for translation theo-
rizing are worth exploring. It is a commonplace belief among translation
scholars that all translations invariably signal foreignness in one way or an-
other, but that view is not entirely accurate when applied to original texts
which are already ‘translated’ (in part or full).8 The Good Earth arguably
reads less ‘foreign’ in translation than in the original, despite the fact that
readers of the original are presented with a ‘transparent’ English text. By
contrast, with novels about Westerners in China or interacting with the Chi-
nese, complete naturalization is next to impossible. This is especially clear if
we consider the responses of both the readers of the original and those of the
translation. Viewed in terms of a familiar vs. strange (or Self vs. Other) spec-
trum, what is intended to be alien (‘Chineseness’) in the original – and this
figures only in isolated patches – turns out to be familiar in the translation,
and what is familiar to the reader in the greater part of the original (‘English-
ness’) becomes that which is alienated or alienating. Put simply, the translation
cannot be a truthful reproduction, or representation, of the original, as far as
the artistic effects are concerned.
There is yet one other related scenario, which I will mention in passing
since the stylistic implications for translation are less disturbing. A novel
like E.M. Forester’s A Passage to India exemplifies the kind of text that is in
part a ‘translation’ because of the prominent presence of nationals from an-
other country, like Maugham’s novel considered above. However, in the event
of a Chinese translation of this novel, both Hindu, used in substantial sec-
tions where the Indian doctor Aziz converses with his Indian friends (see, for
example, the conversation between Aziz, Hamidullah and Mahmoud Ali in
Part I, Chapter 2), and English, the language of the narrator and the expatri-
ates, can be rendered into Chinese without much fuss. The linguistic situation
faced by the translator is similar to that of War and Peace, except that Forster
uses one language and (other than in a few Hindu interjections) not two, as
Tolstoy does. In reading a translation of A Passage to India,9 something funny
happens: the reader is again situated in a liminal realm where he or she can
understand whatever language is being spoken. The reader is thus perfectly
able to deal with multilinguality.
3. Translating interlinguality
So far I have problematized the translation of bilingual situations as pre-

sented in fiction by querying the possibility and effectiveness of using either
one or two languages in the translated text. The difficulties faced in these
cases are, however, modest in comparison with the use, by some of the most
acclaimed novelists of our time, of a bilingual mode of expression whereby
the resources of two languages are integrated and explored. In this context,
James Joyce naturally comes to mind: his success in amalgamating the ener-
gies of more than one language as seen in both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake
is often noted. In contrast to the “dream language” (supposed to “put English
to sleep”) in the latter novel, the verbal richness of the former, made possible
by the alchemical interplay of several languages, is more amenable to analy-
sis and hence more likely to be captured in translation. After three-quarters
of a century of silence, two translations of this masterpiece have appeared
already in Chinese, a language as dissimilar to English as any language can

be. Hence it is appropriate to incorporate Ulysses in our discussion of issues
of multilinguality.
The problems connected with the translation of the multilinguality – rather
than just bilinguality – of Ulysses are fundamentally different from those
discussed above. I have looked above at bilingual situations which occur
through the interaction of characters speaking different languages, which
explains why conversations provide most of the examples offered so far. By
contrast, the playful and experimental heteroglossic passages in Ulysses often
occur in the consciousness of one character – Stephen Dedalus, Leopold
Bloom or Molly Bloom. This is why the many languages are not kept apart,
but fused into a new, third language, appearing on the surface as a hybrid
discourse. In light of this ‘fusing’, bilinguality is perhaps not the best term to
describe the linguistic situation here; ‘interlinguality’ may be more appropriate.
3.1 Joyce’s two languages
Jin Di, former Professor at Nankai University of Tianjin, who spent over
twenty years translating Ulysses into Chinese, is himself a translation theo-
rist. In a recent article he discusses with remarkable insight the choices he
made in translating bilingual passages in this novel, in response to a Taiwan-
ese critic who finds unacceptable (because ‘awkward’) the crude mixing of
Chinese and English in individual sentences, in paragraphs, and in the trans-
lation as a whole (Jin 2000). Jin counters this criticism by analyzing – and
justifying – three of the passages he translated. The first, from ‘The Wander-
ing Rocks’ episode (Chapter 10), is a dialogue involving Stephen and his
music teacher, Almidano Artifoni, in Italian. The second, from ‘Eumaeus’
(Chapter 16), describes a quarrel in which some Italian hooligans are en-
gaged outside a public urinal, and which Bloom and Stephen comment on
right afterwards. The last, from ‘Proteus’ (Chapter 3), is a snippet from
Stephen’s consciousness in which he recalls his lunch with Kevin Egan in
Paris some time earlier, and in which some French remarks are inserted.
In the first two instances, the two languages used by Joyce (English and
Italian) are indeed necessitated by the narrative situation. They are also kept
separate, with each language being assigned to a different character, or group
of characters, or the narrator. In the third, however, it is Stephen’s thoughts
that are presented with some blending of the two languages, French and Eng-
lish (Joyce 1990:43):10
About us gobblers fork spiced beans down their gullets. Un demi

setier! A jet of coffee steam from the burnished caldron. She serves
me at his beck. Il est irlandais. Hollandais? Non fromage. Deux
irlandais, nous, Irlande, vous savez? Ah oui! She thought you wanted
a cheese hollandais.
Yet a close look at this passage reveals that the French portions, being
quotations from what Egan actually said to the waitress (showing Egan’s
less than perfect command of French and the misunderstanding this causes
for the waitress), do not in fact present a different problem from the Italian
passages spoken by Stephen, Artifoni, the hooligans and Bloom in the two
other extracts. Broadening the scope of his discussion, Jin considers at the
end of his article three possibilities for dealing with the intrusive ‘third’ lan-
guage:11 “code-retention” (not translating it), “code-reduction” (translating
it) and “reduction and embellishment” (translating it and polishing it). On
the whole Jin prefers the first strategy, one similar to Sternberg’s “vehicular
matching”, but he takes care to note that translational choices should ulti-
mately be determined by the individual situation narrated, and so there is no
hard-and-fast rule to be applied across the board.
3.2 Joyce’s six languages
Nonetheless, Jin’s extracts do not demonstrate the most challenging of Joyce’s

linguistic experiments involving two or more languages which animate each
other. Take the following example, again from the ‘Proteus’ episode, show-
ing the intricate interlingual relationship between different tongues in the
same text (1990:47-48):
A die-eye at my Hamlet hat … She trudges, shlepps, trains, drags,

trascines her load. A tide westering, moondrawn, in her wake. Tides,
myriad-islanded, within her, blood not mine, oinopa ponton, a wine-
dark sea. Behold the handmaid of the moon. In sleep the wet sign
calls her hour, bids her rise. Bridebed, childbed, bed of death,
ghostcandled. Omnis caro ad te veniet.
Stephen is taking a stroll along Sandymount Strand, trying to idle away

the time before his scheduled meeting with Bloom, when he sees the woman
described in this passage. Six languages meet here: German, French, Italian,
Greek, Latin and English (the last also further contains echoes of Modern
Irish). It is no accident that they coalesce here, for precisely in this chapter
(as in the last part of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) Stephen, the
solitary, contemplative artist, is engaged in an inquiry about language and
reality. He performs some verbal pyrotechnics here in the second sentence
by stringing together five verbs which are synonyms: schlepps (German),
trains (French), trascines (Italian), trudges and drags (English with Anglo-
Saxon roots), while inflecting the first three as if they were English words.
As many Joyce commentators have noted, the reference here is to Eve at the
point when she was expelled from Eden. Other implicit allusions help build
up the woman’s image and the scene in the next few lines. The surroundings
must have reminded Stephen of oinopa ponton – a Greek epithet that recurs
throughout Homer’s Odyssey – translated by Joyce himself as the “wine-
dark sea”. The Latin phrase Omnis caro ad te veniet (meaning ‘All flesh will
come to thee’), lifted from the entrance chant in a Catholic funeral mass, is
then thrown in rather suddenly, as Stephen turns from thoughts of the woman
to the blood within her, then to childbirth, and then to death. Naturally, this
phrase also anticipates the funeral of Dignam in Chapter 6. Essentially, there-
fore, it is a chain of associations and linked images that bind the entire passage
together, enriched with linguistic material from the different tongues.
This “word carnival”, as Vincent Sherry puts it (1994:87), is well-nigh
untranslatable. The crucial thing is that this stream-of-consciousness passage
reflects not only what, but also how, Stephen thinks. Neither Jin’s version
nor Xiao’s adopts a monolingual approach, and advisedly so.12 In short, both
display a sensitivity to the presence of other languages lacking in translators
of an earlier generation, but beyond this their paths diverge. Xiao translates
the Greek and Latin quotations faithfully, in particular borrowing the standard
translation of Omnis caro ad de veniet from the Unified Version of the Chinese
Bible. He also has them printed in Chinese italics. As for the most unsettling
sentence of the passage, he simply transposes (i.e. copies) the German, French
and Italian words in their original form, together with the English word drags.
He is not being consistent here since, judging from his overall approach, one
of his ground rules is to always translate English, the main source language
in this case. Finally, Xiao identifies all the foreign languages used by Joyce
for the reader in endnotes. On the other hand, Jin leaves the Latin and Greek
phrases untranslated and explains them in footnotes. But he uses no italics at
all, neither here nor in the rest of the book, except for long, indented quotations.
Again Jin runs into trouble with the “schlepps, trains, drags, trascines”
sentence: he translates the sequence of all five verbs into Chinese, giving the
reader not the slightest signal that the text is at this point ‘intruded’ by the
foreign. No footnotes appear at the bottom of the page either.13
In noting Xiao’s inclusion of drags in his list of foreign words, as well as
Jin’s practice of translating the German, French and Italian-derived words

into Chinese without adding a footnote, I am not suggesting that the two
translators could have been more careful. The point is, even greater care could
not have helped. After all, what is the point of telling the reader that a certain
word or phrase is German (or French or Italian) in the original? The point of
Joyce’s presentation of multilinguality in Stephen’s thought-patterns is not
primarily to show Stephen as a polyglot who has at his disposal several lan-
guages, although he is – the language of Bloom’s consciousness is, by contrast,
not marked by similar multilingual features. Stephen is to be seen, rather, as
a wordsmith whose language contains a buried treasure of multiple signifi-
cance. Schlepps is not German, trains is not French, and trascines is not
Italian; they are not English either. They are in-between codes – an inter-
language – or at best English that carries traces of other languages, and from
this angle both Xiao’s and Jin’s translational solutions can be seen as ad-
equate and inadequate at the same time. The key is cross-fertilization, the
release of verbal energy through the collision of words from different tongues.
This is a special problem with the Chinese translations – or rather all Chinese
translations of bilingual Western language texts. Visually and graphologically,
the two languages of translation in Xiao and Jin – Chinese characters and the
Western alphabet – do not mix on the page. We might say that italicized and
non-italicized words interweave better. In the context of the present discus-
sion of Joyce’s novel, interlinguality may be more translatable in some
languages than in others.
4. Translating intralinguality
Our post-Babelian age has certainly seen an increase in the number of prac-
tising bilingual and multilingual writers, especially bricoleurs of European
languages who have gone even beyond Joyce in playing games with lan-
guages. The special case of Vladimir Nabokov is one such, and his most
experimental work Ada, virtually a mèlange of three different languages,14
still defies translation into Chinese. While his two acquired languages, French
and Russian, are sometimes marked off from the English text in his novels,
constituting a kind of trilingual interplay of codes, most of the time Nabokov
still deploys an ostensibly English medium shot through with russicisms and
Gallicisms that reveal themselves most blatantly through punning (see
Lokrantz 1973, Proffer 1968). He has in effect succeeded in fashioning a
hybrid language, a unique chain of signifiers fit to express the special experi-
ence of a writer in extended exile.15 Given such a situation, it would be
inappropriate to speak of the interlingual characteristics of his prose. Consid-
ering the fact that his language is one divided against itself because of the
incorporation of foreign lexicons and syntactical structures that jar against
the ‘native’ tongue, his is more appropriately described as a case of intra-
linguality.
Comparable cases of writers using an English that conflates and coalesces

two or several languages are numerous. Coming most readily to mind are
expatriate writers in circumstances close to Nabokov’s, like Samuel Beckett;
Anglophone writers of African descent like Wole Soyink and Chinua Achebe;
Chicano writers like Americo Paredes; and non-native writers of English in
former British and American colonies (for example, India and the Philip-
pines). While crossing from one culture to another, from one language to
another, these writers take with them traces of their mother culture and na-
tive tongue, and so they end up with a kind of cross-writing that resembles
translating, and a writing medium that appears monolingual but is in fact
bilingual. In allowing the different languages to intersect and interweave,
these writers create a style that is foreign yet familiar, but decidedly original
and, for many, capable of enriching the scope of the English language. What
happens when their works get translated? What happens, in particular, when
the target language of translation happens to be the foreign tongue ‘erased’
but ‘still functioning’ in the source text?
Several highly acclaimed Chinese-American works in the past two dec-
ades can be fruitfully viewed from this perspective. I will focus on Maxine
Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1977) and Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck
Club (1989), and their translations into Chinese – two of the former by Zhang
Shi (1984) and Li Jianbo/Lu Chengyi (1998), and one of the latter by Yu
Renrui (1990). The language used in these texts is of interest from several
perspectives.
4.1 Transliterations of Chinese
Of course, as in Pearl Buck’s novels about China, sometimes bilingual situa-

tions are described which involve speakers of Chinese and English; often,
too, conversations in Chinese are translated in toto from Chinese into Eng-
lish. Elsewhere, it is also typical and recurrent practice for the narrators of
Chinese-American fiction to draw attention to certain words or phrases that
intrude into the text as Chinese; these are usually printed in italics. There is
greater blending of linguistic material here, and tension is at times perceiv-
able just beneath the surface, yet the two languages are disparate and separate.
For example, in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club the word shou is embedded
in the text at a crucial point of the narrative: “This is how a daughter honors
her mother. It is shou so deep it is in your bones” (1989:63). The irony,
however, is that there is no consensus (beyond the awareness that it is defi-
nitely a Chinese character) among the various translators of the novel
concerning the exact Chinese character for shou. It has been translated as
‘filiality’ (xiao), ‘shame’ (xiu) and ‘instinct’ (xing) (see Jin 1995).
The use of shou can be understood as an example of a “strategy of appro-
priation” prevalent among post-colonial writers, according to Ashcroft et al.
– the direct transference of “untranslated words” from the foreign tongue (or
“source-language loanwords”; 1989:61-66; see also Onwuemene 1999). To
be more precise, however, it is an instance of the transliteration of a foreign
word: since Chinese characters cannot be comfortably incorporated into a
text of roman type, loanwords are out of the question. The interesting thing is
that the character seems to have been mistransliterated, giving rise to the
difficulty the three translators had of identifying the original word.16
Perhaps one can speak, in this regard, of Chinese-American authors’ bla-
tant mistranslations: ‘love’ (ai) in Chinese translated as “to embrace, to hug”
(in Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone, (Ng 1993:23), ‘younger female cousin on the
paternal side’ (tangmei) as “sugar sister” (in Tan’s The Joy Luck Club), and
so on.17 The question of whether the mistranslations were intended cannot be

answered easily. It has been argued that Chinese-American authors’ under-
standing of Chinese language, culture and traditions is limited, yet there are
clear cases where the ‘mistranslations’ are intended, and some are calibrated
to produce ironic or humorous effects.
4.2 Literal translations
A similar situation obtains with the straightforward, literal translation of Chi-

nese phrases prevalent in Asian-American literature. In general it can be said
that whereas the Joyce of Ulysses does not always translate – he juxtaposes
languages on the printed page – Chinese-American authors consistently trans-
late for their readers, though they appear hindered by their lack of command
of Chinese (which most speak but can hardly write). On the other hand,
whereas Pearl Buck prefers complete naturalization in ‘translating’ her nar-
ratives of Chinese peasant life, Chinese-American authors largely prioritize
literal translation and end up with ‘Chinglish’.
Ever since Ashcroft et al., great interest has been shown by textual critics
in the postcolonial writers’ linguistic strategies, especially literal translation,
meant to resist the domination of English, the language which they often use
as their medium of expression. Naturally, there are narrative situations that
demand literal translation, as when Maxine Hong Kingston renders the speech
of her parents in a kind of ‘eye-dialect’: her father says at one point, “No
read Japanese. Japanese words. Me Chinese” (1977:53). But deliberate at-
tempts are also made to ‘insert’ the Chinese linguistic presence: mahjong is
rendered as “hemp-bird game” (ibid.:126), America as “Beautiful Nation”
(ibid.:132), first wife as “Big Wife” and concubine as “Little Wife” (ibid.:132).
In fact, a young, emergent Chinese-American writer, Wang Ping, has made
remarkable use of literal translation in a story called ‘Fox Smell’ (Wang 1994).
‘Fox smell’ is a literal translation of the Chinese word for ‘odour in the arm-
pits’, and in the story it is her fox smell that makes it so difficult for Seaweed
(a literal translation of a Chinese name) to find a husband in the States.
Other features in Chinese-American fiction that signal the foreignness of

another language are numerous. The resources of the writer’s native tongue
and those of English are combined in the following sentence from The Joy
Luck Club: “Both inside and outside have a sour feeling”, a case of a Chinese
sentence literally translated.18 A phrase coined by Maxine Hong Kingston
through a literal rendition of a Chinese expression – ‘talk story’ (1977:25;
also 1977:164) – has passed from The Woman Warrior into the Chinese-
American vocabulary, and even made the theme of an academic conference
on Asian-American writings in Hawaii in the seventies. Further, the inclu-
sion of proverbs, aphorisms and idioms, so prevalent in the works of African
writers in English (Osakwe 1999), is also another strategy used by Kingston:
one notes, for instance, “Girls are maggots in the rice” (1977:45) and “A
ready tongue is an evil” (ibid.:148).
4.3 Double-voiced language
The pidginized English used by Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan is a
language with two contending voices, reaching out toward an uneasy synthe-
sis. Cynthia Wong describes the characteristics of Amy Tan’s language by
noting “the preponderance of short, choppy sentences and the frequent omis-
sion of sentence subjects”, which to her are “conventions whereby the Chinese
can be recognized as Other” (Wong 1995: 188-89); to Frank Chin et al., the
language of Asian-American writers embodies a “dual personality”, a “multi-
voiced schizophrenia” (1974:xlvii, xxxix); for Amy Tan (1996:44), the
language she uses is her “mother[’s] tongue –
what I imagined to be [my mother’s] translation of her Chinese if she

could speak in perfect English, her internal language, and for that I
preserve the essence, but neither an English nor a Chinese structure.
What we cannot fail to recognize is that this is also the language of trans-
lation. It is comparable to (or the obverse of) Europeanized Chinese, produced
when the Chinese language comes into contact with Western languages (pri-
marily English), borrows extensively from the latter, and becomes ‘colonized’.
In Europeanized Chinese, foreign lexis, structures and syntax are an Other
coming from the outside and superimposed upon the indigenous tongue; its
most visible occurrences are found in Chinese translations of Western liter-
ary works. This kind of Chinese is thus the language of coloniality.
Asian-American English, on the other hand, bears witness to the ‘contami-
nation’ of English from within when immigrant writers find nourishment
from their mother tongue; it is the language of postcoloniality.19 Neverthe-
less, these two languages of translation, emerging under rather different
circumstances, are similar by virtue of their hybrid nature, and their being
fraught with the politics of intralinguality.20

The problematics of translating multi-voiced texts like the ones cited above
can best be defined with reference to four types of readers: the English mono-
lingual reader of the original; the Chinese monolingual reader of the
translation; the bilingual reader of the original; and the bilingual reader of
the translation. The latter two types are of course the new breed of post-
Babelian readers. Clearly such polyglottal readers have a relative advantage
over their monolingual counterparts, in that they have less difficulty tuning
into the modalities of the original text as well as the translation(s), both shot
through with foreignisms – Chinese in one case and English in the other. The
only difference is that what is alien in the original will turn out to be familiar
in the translation, and vice versa; the foreign is naturalized as back-translating

restores the original. Among the innumerable exoticisms that can be cited
from the two novels (abbreviated as WW and JLC) are the following:
“Without Wood” (JLC, p. 278 – alludes to one of the Five Elements

in Chinese belief);
“Knees bent, I would swing into the slow, measured ‘square step’”
(WW, p. 29 – refers to the martial arts);
“‘chink’ words and ‘gook’ words” (WW, p. 53);
“Children and Old Men Not Cheated” (WW, p. 76 – a Chinese prov-

erb); and
“A husband may kill a wife that destroys him” (WW, p. 173 – accord-
ing to Confucius)
They appear without drawing the least attention to themselves in Chinese

translation. By contrast, the literal renditions in the two translations of The
Woman Warrior of English idiomatic expressions like “heaven help him”
(WW, p. 45) and terms like “Shaman” (WW, p. 55), together with an abun-
dance of stilted expressions, create a jarring note, figuring quite awkwardly
in what is otherwise a perfectly naturalized text. In fact, in these two transla-
tions the general success in naturalizing the original (for example, an
expression like “precious only daughter” – WW, p. 17 – becomes qianjin)
throws into sharp relief the inconsistencies, the out-of-place parts that are
sadly incompatible with the whole. The two languages continue to war against
one another in the translated Chinese.
As intralingual texts – it can even be said that a translation is the intralingual
text par excellence – the translations of Chinese-American authors and their
originals deserve to be looked at from a post-Babelian perspective. Since the
Chinese echoes in the original are not perceived by the monolingual reader
of English but accessible only to those familiar with the two languages, nov-
els like The Woman Warrior and The Joy Luck Club are virtually double-coded
texts, or texts with a secret code. Contrary to expectation, the secret code is
not revealed through a translation because the translation (which also con-
tains two codes) is coded differently. In other words, the coordinate
bilingualism of the source text is only reflected in the coordinate bilingual-
ism of the target text, but the linguistic engineering achieved by the author
cannot be duplicated, nor is it transferable. There is one further difference:
the negotiation between the two interlocking voices in the source language is
clearly more functional – making a political statement of its own, contesting
linguistic dominance – than the random juxtaposition of voices in the target
language of the translation. Consequently, these voices in the source text are
‘interactive’; those in the translated text are interlocked uneasily. Hence, al-
though the translator’s language bears a remarkable affinity to the language
of the postcolonial writer or the minority writer, they are not the same.
5. Conclusion
The implications of the above discussion for translation theory can be appre-
ciated with reference to the following statement by Jacques Derrida
(1985b:100):
[translation] can get anything across except this: the fact that there
are, in one linguistic system, perhaps several languages or tongues.
Sometimes – I would even say always – several tongues. This is im-
purity in every language … So, if the unity of the linguistic system is
not a sure thing, all of this conceptualization around translation (in
the so-called proper sense of translation) is threatened.21
The challenge of Derrida’s statement is that we need to rethink the basic

question of what is entailed by ‘translation’. If we continue to place at the
centre of our theorizing the single-language model that has dominated
discussions of translation, we will fail not only to accommodate situations
involving two or more languages, but also to account for what happens in
translation to a language that is bifurcated (as the world’s languages
increasingly are) by at least two tongues, divided against itself because of
processes akin to what linguists have called pidginization. Given the present-
day pronounced movement of the world’s populations, the availability of
opportunities for learning a second or even a third language, and greater
opportunities for meeting people of other cultures and nations, bilingual writers
or readers will eventually outnumber those with only monolingual facility.
There will also be more bilinguals conversant with Western and non-Western
languages than there has been in the past, when polyglots were primarily
people equipped with a smattering of European languages.

Whether we like it or not, we are likely to see increasing polyglottism. At
the centre of the problem of how to translate texts containing more than one
language is the fact that, if each language depicts things in one world, then
there are two worlds in a bilingual text. In analyzing several novels in trans-
lation, I have tried to highlight the issues concerned, since the novel has always
been the site of contestation between languages; it has always been about the
way languages clash. Serving as a crucible for dialogic interaction and a plat-
form for pluralistic discourses, it provides excellent examples involving
situational and conversational code-switching (discussed in the first two sec-
tions), as well as instances of code-switching within a narrative discourse (in
the last two sections).

As for the way in which a second language makes its presence felt in a
text, situations vary, though it is clear that the foreign is never allowed to
dominate. Bilingualism (or multilingualism) in fiction takes many forms: from
the occasional insertion of a foreign word (directly transposed as a loanword
or transliterated), to the incorporation of untranslated passages of conversa-
tion, to big chunks of text intercalated with foreign words and expressions.
The following diagram shows the four different scenarios discussed above,
with special attention drawn to the languages used and the corresponding
realities expressed:
reality expression translated as examples
I bilingual bilingual monolingual Tolstoy, Hemingway

or bilingual
II bilingual* monolingual monolingual Maugham, Clavell,
Malraux, Forster
III monolingual bilingual** monolingual Joyce
or bilingual
IV monolingual monolingual monolingual Nabokov, Beckett,
Kingston, Tan
* This does not refer to Pearl S. Buck’s fiction.

** Or multilingual, as the case may be.
The choice available to the translator between a monolingual and a bilin-

gual rendition is shown in the third column, although constraint is always
exerted by the original, so that nowhere does one see more languages used in
the translation than in its source. (There is one exceptional case not consid-
ered here, though: erotic fiction has received rather different treatment. For
instance, the seventeenth-century Chinese classic Plum in the Golden Vase

has been rendered into German by Kuhn, in a translation where Latin pas-
sages are inserted when sexual acts are described. Hence a monolingual text
is translated into a bilingual one.) Only rarely does the translator decide to
use more than two languages, conceivably because the reader would not be
comfortable with a confusion of tongues on the printed page.
The translated reality is never directly relatable to the languages used – for
instance, conversations in Russian can be narrated in English, and Spanish
characters can think in Chinese. The boundaries set up between languages
are thus finally broken; a liberation of languages is, paradoxically, achieved;
the link between a language and the world it is supposed to conjure up is
completely severed. In this state of affairs, where one tongue towers above
the others, the reader sees and understands everything with equal perspicac-
ity and, despite his or her monolinguality, the dream of a heteroglottal view
of the world seems finally within reach. This reality is conveyed in a lan-
guage comparable to that of pre-Babelian times, the language of God recovered
though the tower of Babel has not been rebuilt – though the potential success
of the endeavour is still very much in question.
Derrida’s concern that the foundations of translation theory may be rocked
because languages are already pluralized is not altogether ungrounded. There
is truth in his contention that translation is not related to an extralinguistic
reality – it only faces another language. In asking whether multilinguality is
translatable, Derrida is issuing a call for us to theorize translation on a broader
basis. To define translation as a process of verbal transfer involving two lan-
guages is certainly too limiting. In recent years the translation studies field
has witnessed an enormous amount of research dealing with the translation
of classical works into a modern idiom, oral translation of written texts, cross-
media translation (like subtitling), and so on. Interest has also been revived
in Roman Jakobson’s idea of three main types of translation – intralingual,
interlingual and intersemiotic translation (1959).22 Perhaps there needs to be
a refocusing on intralingual translation, which has received much less atten-
tion than interlingual translation – and even intersemiotic translation – and
on the implications of intralinguality. If the prevalence of the fourth scenario
discussed above is any indication of future trends, then intralinguality will
obviously stimulate much greater research interest than it has done hitherto.
The increased use of translational methods by writers from the postcolonial
and postmodern camps alerts us to the need to rethink the notion of transla-
tion.23 Most existing theoretical models are founded on a concern for how
meaning is transmitted from one linguistic system to another. But if the sys-
tems are not themselves separate, but implicated in one another, the notion of
translation as a process of transferring meaning immediately becomes de-
stabilized. Recent writers’ appropriation and/or expropriation of translation
strategies in their fiction and poetry is proof that the activity of translation is
of much wider scope and more universally deployed. Once we accept that
the task of the writer is indistinguishable from that of the translator, and that
writing necessarily involves and is preceded by an act of translation, the bound-
ary between translation and original writing also becomes blurred. Greater
complexity seems guaranteed for translation theorizing in the days to come,
and there is less reason, again, for translation to be seen as a marginal activ-
ity. Indeed, all texts can ultimately be considered translations, regardless of
whether they have undergone the process of verbal transfer that we usually
call ‘translation’.
LEO TAK-HUNG CHAN

Department of Translation, Lingnan University, Tuen Mun, Hong Kong.
chanleo@ln.edu.hk
Notes
1. Eoyang further elaborates this position in a later article, where he also

analyzes Meir Sternberg’s tripartite scheme for achieving translational mi-
mesis (1995:293-94).
2. Even the number of people (like Anglophones) who can successfully cling
onto their monolinguality is on the decline, as witness the present situation
in the United States and the United Kingdom. No doubt the spread of
education, the increasing contact among peoples, etc., have helped in
substantially altering what could have been the further strengthening of a
monolingual situation.
3. Sternberg (1981:239) coins the term “standard translation”, which he places
in contrast to “translational mimesis”.
4. In the case of War and Peace as discussed here, it is possible to speak of
languages serving the function of sociolects or registers, but one obviously
cannot generalize about the many possible functions played by foreign lan-
guages in a literary text. Not all of them function as just ‘registers’, for
example.
5. For another discussion of Western fiction about the Chinese in the same
period, see MacKerras (1989), esp. Chapter 6.
6. Zhong Wen’s version (1978) is actually a reprint of an earlier translation
by You (1959).
7. Terms introduced by James Holmes and Lawrence Venuti, among others.
8. In this context we can think of Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth itself as a
complete translation, and works like War and Peace as partial translations.
9. To the best of my knowledge, there are at least four Chinese translations of
A Passage to India, by Shi Jiqing, Lin Shu, Shi Youshan, and Yang Zijian/
Shao Cuiying.
10. The Chinese translations of Ulysses are: Jin Di (1996) and Xiao and Wen
(1995). A third translation is forthcoming.
11. The dominant source language is the first language, the target language is
the second, and the other language present in the source text, the third.
12. For convenience sake, Xiao Qian and Wen Jieruo’s version of Ulysses will
hereafter be referred to as Xiao’s.
13. Jin Di reiterates his preference for non-translation in yet another article
(Jin 1998). To him, “Those words, which are foreign to the English reader,
of course, ought to remain unchanged in the translation because rendering
them into the target language would prevent the reader from seeing the
exoticism which is part of the artistic design, but everything which appears
in the language must now appear in the target language” (1998:227).
14. It is perhaps more accurate to say that Nabokov uses four other tongues
(Latin, Greek, German and Italian) in addition to his three languages (Eng-
lish, French and Russian) in Ada (see Amy 1995).
15. On top of this, Nabokov has translated the works of others as well as his
own, and advanced a theory of translation espousing an extremist position
that few would dare to advocate. His central ideas concerning the literalist
method are spelt out in his introduction to his own translation of Pushkin’s
Eugene Onegin.
16. In The Woman Warrior, too, the names of the various categories of Chi-
nese ghosts mentioned by Maxine Hong Kingston (like “Sit Dom Kuei”
and “Good Foundation Ghost”) continue to perplex translators.
17. For a brief list of these ‘mistakes’, see Wong (1995:174-210).
18. This example is mentioned by Wong, though she does not think of it as “a
direct English equivalent of an idiomatic Chinese sentence” (that is, a lit-
eral translation; 1995:189), but I tend to think it is.
19. Though ‘colonialism’ and ‘postcolonialism’ are more commonly used terms
(in politics, sociology and cultural studies), in this article ‘coloniality’ and
‘postcoloniality’ are used instead. They are preferred because modes of
thought rather than systems of ideas are in question here.
20. For recent discussions of the issue of hybridity in translations, the reader
is referred to the special issue of Across Languages and Cultures 2.2 (2001).
21. To my mind, this quotation from Derrida shows concerns slightly different
from those in the essay ‘Des Tours de Babel’: there his focus is on the
impossibility of translation, but here he is talking about the limitations of
present theorizing about translation.
22. Presumably Derrida would have objected to Jakobson’s three-category clas-
sification, though not to the recognition accorded to intralinguality in
Jakobson’s model.
23. The call for refocusing on intralingual translation could mean there is no
substantial difference between translation studies and comparative litera-
ture cum cultural studies. Should translation scholars and translators be
criticized for promoting the illusion of separate languages and cultures?
References
Amy, Christine (1995) ‘Vladimir Nabokov: The Translator’s Perplexity in a Maze

of Languages’, in Ian Mason and Christine Raguet-Bouvart (eds) Cross-words:
Issues and Debates in Literary and Non-Literary Translating, Liege: Univer-

sity of Liege, 121-38.
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (1989) The Empire Writes Back:
Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literature, London: Routledge.
Bakhtin, Mikhail (1981) ‘Discourse in the Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination:
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Chan - Translating Bilinguality. Theorizing Translation in thePost-Babelian Era

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This article was downloaded by: [Newcastle University]

On: 20 December 2014, At: 01:29

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13556509.2002.10799116

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

LEO TAK-HUNG CHAN

addresses a number of situations where bilinguality impacts on

In an essay anthologized in The Transparent Eye, Eugene Eoyang enunci-

ISSN 1355-6509 © St Jerome Publishing, Manchester

how to translate an original that is already linguistically pluralized, although

is at variance with the traditional theoretical emphasis on formal and seman-

Referential Homogenizing Vehicular

Object Unilingual Polylingual Polylingual

Medium Unilingual Unilingual Polylingual

1. Translating two tongues

The deployment of a second language in literary and non-literary texts – one

described), it is worth looking more closely at Book 3, Part 2 (August 1812),

(1) The omniscient narrator uses Russian (translated into Chinese);

The treatment of this passage by Rosemary Edmonds also contrasts sharply

2. Translating the translated

2.1 Pearl S. Buck as ‘translator’

There is a conspicuous tradition of fictional works in English depicting lives

“If I have a handful of silver it is because I work and my wife works,

“I am no longer young and it is not necessary for me to work since I

Despite traces of an attempt to remind readers that Chinese is being spoken,

2.2 Clavell, Malraux and Maugham

The Tai-pan is your father. He gave you life. He is my god. He bought

In much the same way, the revolutionaries who planned a Communist

So far I have problematized the translation of bilingual situations as pre-

already in Chinese, a language as dissimilar to English as any language can

3.1 Joyce’s two languages

About us gobblers fork spiced beans down their gullets. Un demi

3.2 Joyce’s six languages

Nonetheless, Jin’s extracts do not demonstrate the most challenging of Joyce’s

A die-eye at my Hamlet hat … She trudges, shlepps, trains, drags,

Stephen is taking a stroll along Sandymount Strand, trying to idle away

Jin’s practice of translating the German, French and Italian-derived words

Comparable cases of writers using an English that conflates and coalesces

4.1 Transliterations of Chinese

Of course, as in Pearl Buck’s novels about China, sometimes bilingual situa-

so on.17 The question of whether the mistranslations were intended cannot be

4.2 Literal translations

A similar situation obtains with the straightforward, literal translation of Chi-

Other features in Chinese-American fiction that signal the foreignness of

4.3 Double-voiced language

what I imagined to be [my mother’s] translation of her Chinese if she

fraught with the politics of intralinguality.20

in the translation, and vice versa; the foreign is naturalized as back-translating

“Without Wood” (JLC, p. 278 – alludes to one of the Five Elements

“‘chink’ words and ‘gook’ words” (WW, p. 53);

“Children and Old Men Not Cheated” (WW, p. 76 – a Chinese prov-

They appear without drawing the least attention to themselves in Chinese

The challenge of Derrida’s statement is that we need to rethink the basic

people equipped with a smattering of European languages.

the last two sections).

reality expression translated as examples

I bilingual bilingual monolingual Tolstoy, Hemingway

* This does not refer to Pearl S. Buck’s fiction.

The choice available to the translator between a monolingual and a bilin-

instance, the seventeenth-century Chinese classic Plum in the Golden Vase

LEO TAK-HUNG CHAN

1. Eoyang further elaborates this position in a later article, where he also

Amy, Christine (1995) ‘Vladimir Nabokov: The Translator’s Perplexity in a Maze

Issues and Debates in Literary and Non-Literary Translating, Liege: Univer-