‘Al-hay as-sini’ explored : the linguistic and semiotic landscape of Dubai Mall ‘Chinatown’ as a translated space and transnational contact zone

Abstract

Dubai in the UAE is a poster child of the region. The ‘Chinatown’ within Dubai Mall is an artificially-made theme-park-style place and a commodified space designed for consumption, which stands in contrast to traditional and naturally-occurring Chinatowns in North America, Europe and Southeast Asia. A new addition to the luxurious Dubai Mall, the ‘Chinatown’ features shops and restaurants in a China-inspired environment. Representing a different ethnolinguistic ecology, the ‘Chinatown’ is a unique existence in a superdiverse and mobile country made up of local Arabs and foreign workers/expats from the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia and beyond. This study explores how various linguistic and multimodal elements participate in the making of the linguistic/semiotic landscape of Dubai Mall ‘Chinatown’. This study highlights that both linguistic (Chinese characters) and non-linguistic elements (e.g. red colour and neon lights) are strategically combined as meaning-making resources to give the area authenticity and a unique image and identity. Conceptually, this ‘Chinatown’ is theorised as a case of ‘translation’ and cultural (re)contextualisation, where cultural elements from a far-away land are localised/recontextualised to adopt new social meanings. This study contributes to scholarship in sociolinguistics and applied linguistics, especially in commodified man-made spaces in transnational urban zones in our globalised world.