The losses and gains of translation
“For the coloniser, reducing a language to a few flat notes makes the language easier to understand, … easier to define, easier to stereotype.”
– Allison Chan, Peril, 2016.
In the 1890s, when a witness deemed 'unable to speak sufficient English' gave testimony in the Melbourne Supreme Court an interpreter verbally translated this speech into English. A clerk of court then transcribed onto paper the interpreter’s English rendition. Through these processes, non-English speaking people became legal subjects. Through these processes, some of the witnesses’ intended meaning was surely lost in translation.
Some of the documents in this exhibit are from the April 1895 perjury trial, The Queen v Mow Tan. A bi-lingual member of the court audience, Albert Wah Sing, testified that he had heard the employed interpreter, Ah Jack, mistranslate Mow Tan’s testimony. These legal testimonies were originally rendered from the 19th Century language varieties of Sze Yup into English.
The other documents in this exhibit show testimony performed in the 1893 murder trial. A witness called Dadda Singh gave testimony via interpreter Arthur Pritchard because Dadda Singh’s son, Kaizer Singh, had been murdered by a Gippsland settler, John Conder. These legal testimonies were originally rendered from the 19th Century language varieties of 'Hindustani' into English.
The reverse translations displayed here are, necessarily, and like their 1890s counterparts, approximations. We’ll never know the extent to which these reverse translations capture the meaning intended by the witnesses. And yet, the process of translating these documents into Hindi and Cantonese alerts us to the dominance of English in colonial life, and in the legal system, and the historical distortion of the voices of non-English speakers.
In 1966, the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights prescribed that communities and individuals should have equal linguistic rights. https://culturalrights.net/descargas/drets_culturals389.pdf . Today, Victorian statutory provisions grant the right to an interpreter under certain circumstances. http://classic.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/vic/consol_act/ca195882/s464d.html Australian common law, though, does not provide an automatic right to an interpreter for any legal party, including a witness or the accused.
What do you think? Are language rights important? And should we find more ways to resist the dominance of English language monolingualism? If so, how? And where?