Introducing Singapore’s kampong life through translation : a case study of Papa as a Little Boy Named Ah Khoon

Abstract

In the past, Singapore was mainly made up of “kampongs” – a word derived from the Malay term kampung which refers to village, and the way of life of people staying in the kampongs was termed “kampong life”. Kampong life is a unique cultural heritage of Singapore that is worth preserving and promoting, which explains the presence of books written by local authors on their personal recounts of growing up in kampongs. However, most of them were written in English, except for a few Chinese books with brief content. Therefore, this paper seeks to address this issue by introducing kampong life through the translation of the English book titled Papa as a Little Boy Named Ah Khoon. Selected sections from the book that were representative of kampong life were translated into Chinese. The data, as represented by the source and target texts, were analysed from a theoretical perspective, where relevant theories were applied to explain the strategies employed and phenomenon observed in the translation. The analysis revealed several findings, including the importance of producing a piece of translation that is easy to understand, and the relationship between the choice of translation strategies and the aim of translation, where the latter has an influence over the former. These findings addressed the questions derived as part of the research, including how the selected book can be translated from English to Chinese so as to effectively introduce kampong life to the target audience, and the ways in which the Hokkien dialect and Singapore local terms presented in the book can be translated into Chinese. This research also serves as a useful reference for future research in related fields. Keywords: kampong life, translation, Hokkien terms, Singapore local terms, theories