Translating hybrid texts in Hong Kong : a case study of the English translation of Chan Koon Chung's Kamdu cha canting

Abstract

Chan Koon Chung is a native writer from Hong Kong. With few exceptions, his fiction feeds on the kaleidoscopic urban life of Hong Kong, depicting the “little” stories of all walks of life that he has closely observed since childhood. His stories, written in a mixture of Mandarin, Cantonese and English, are often an amalgamation of various cultures in Hong Kong (including the predominant British and Chinese cultures, as well as some lesser cultures such as Indian, Pakistani, Nepali, etc.), for which he has been called a “pioneering critic for metropolitan life and culture.” His fiction, which often embodies Hong Kong’s colonial historical and linguistic characteristics, is particularly revealing of the unique position of Hong Kong’s modern literature as a special “sub-system” in the polysystem of modern Chinese literature (see Even-Zohar, 1978). To use Samia Mehrez’s term, Chan’s stories are in fact “hybrid” or “métisses” texts due to “the culture-linguistic layering which exists within them” (1992, p. 121). This chapter examines the English version of Chan Koon Chung’s fiction Kamdu cha canting (Can-do Tea Restaurant) to find out how the hybrid features were rendered in the original work and whether the image of the “colonial self” characterized by the protagonist was adequately rendered in the translation. It is noted that Chan’s creative use of language hybrids, including “language varieties, idiolects, jargon, metaphors, puns, coinage and an infinite abundance of allusions” (Snell-Hornby, 200, p. 209), was originally intended to create a “new language,” which was greatly downplayed in the translation. As a result, the “in-between” cultural space of the protagonist, which is typically represented by the superimposition of these hybrid linguistic features, has been severely undermined. The chapter concludes with a plea for the need to apply a scene and frame model in the translation of hybrid literature, where the translator is encouraged to look at the text holistically and draw on all the essential related knowledge to understand the linguistic signs before opting for top-down overall translation strategies and devising bottom-up translation solutions.