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  • SHOTInternationalization and the Art of Translation
  • Francesca Bray (bio)

It is an honor and a great pleasure to address you here today in Singapore. This is an important emotional and intellectual anniversary for me: it is forty years (all but a few weeks) since I first set foot in Singapore on my very first visit to Asia. On 8 September 1976 I stumbled off the plane at Changi Airport into the warm tropical dusk, fragrant with frangipani blossom and wood smoke. Singapore was a brief stopover on my way to Kelantan in Malaysia, where I was to spend a year working with rice farmers on the impact of Green Revolution technologies.1 Peering out of the taxi as we raced from Changi Airport into town I saw dim lamplight from the kampongs reflected in the shallow waters of rice-paddies. I was ecstatic: at last I had made it to the rice-growing tropics that I had so long wanted to study first hand, and in Singapore I would have a chance to explore my first truly Chinese city.2

The next morning I had a shock. The headlines on the newsstands proclaimed the death of Chairman Mao. China, the civilization I studied, was [End Page 815] entering a new era. But that challenge would have to wait: for now I was discovering a delicious new world. I walked through the shop-houses along Jalan Bras Basah and Orchard Road examining bales of batik, tubs overflowing with every possible kind of rice, and state-of-the-art Japanese watches not yet available at home in Britain. I was surrounded by a babel of Tamil, Malay, Hokkien, Cantonese, and Hakka conversation, of shop-signs in Chinese characters, Arabic, and Tamil script, a multilingual maze that stopped nobody from doing business.

Singapore was obviously just as modern as Britain, and it obviously had just as interesting and long a history, but I could see at once that Singaporeans “did” modernity, and history, in a completely different way.

What, for instance, did the history of China look like from Singapore? I had studied Chinese language and history for many years, but as I walked among the shophouses, scanned the titles of the Chinese press, or pulled out a book from the shelves at ISEAS, I realized that the histories of China I had so far engaged with were all histories written about the center and from the center, histories about China as the Central Kingdom, organized by dynasty and authored by scholars based in China itself, in Europe, in Japan, or in North America.3 They had done little to prepare me for the realities of the Chinese diaspora, for understanding its ways of being Chinese, its different rhythms and periods, its different challenges and resources, its crucial role in building the trading zones of Southeast Asia, past, present, and to come, or its immense importance in shaping the political, economic, and cultural history of China. I realized for the first time that just as a knowledge of China was necessary to make sense of Singapore, so too, for a full understanding of modern mainland China, I needed to learn from Singapore and its polyglot clamor.4 [End Page 816]

The Singapore of forty years ago has of course been transformed. Today it is wealthy, clean, orderly.5 A new, tidy hegemony of dominant languages prevails: the untidy buzz of regional Chinese languages has been replaced by two global languages, English and Mandarin Chinese.6 Singapore today is clean, green, and urban, a city-state with boundless technological ambitions and leading scientific institutions.7 But Singapore is still a crossroads, a trading zone, a polyglot, international hub whose success depends upon successful translation: translation between languages, between cultures, between histories, between regions, and between interests.8 [End Page 817]

SHOT too has ambitions as an international hub. For the last few years SHOT has been vigorously pursuing internationalization as a goal in itself, and as a means to diversify. The proportion of non-North American members has increased; we now hold one meeting in three outside North America. Yet SHOT remains a profoundly North American society, more perhaps than many of its...

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