Cosmopolitan translation in multilingual cities: a Macao experience

Abstract

As a Chinese society featuring multilingualism, Macao is a showcase for the encounter between Chinese and Western cultures. Its public signs often see a flexible alignment of scripts in Chinese, Portuguese and English, which declare a kind of correspondence, equivalence and thus translation. This study examines the multilingual linguistic landscape, and reveals how the harmonious coexistence of polymorphous cultural streams makes Macao a microcosm cultivating and being cultivated by cosmopolitan translation. This paper takes a translational approach to linguistic landscape research, with the focus on the relation and interaction of languages. The study of Macao’s linguistic landscape challenges the binary notion of translation as something perennially related to source and target texts, and deconstructs the linear conception of translation as something that happens to be an original that moves across cultural and linguistic boundaries. This study also sheds some light on the interlingual practices in other multilingual cities, theoretically and methodologically.

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