Thick translation, migrants’ life narratives and transnational literacy: Exploring Chinese migrants’ place-making in modern Australian society

Abstract

This paper unpacks the conceptual and practical issues of translating migrants’ life narratives, focusing on the challenge of untranslatability. Considering the translation of migrants’ life writing as both social documentation and historical knowledge production, the paper argues there is a need for a translation approach that combines ethnography, philosophy and cultural semantics. Adopting an empirically established linguistic framework rooted in universal concepts, it illustrates how the philosophical idea ‘thick translation’, expounded by Kwame Anthony Appiah, can be fruitfully applied to migrant life writing, presenting annotated translations of selected terms that appear in life stories published in the Australian Chinese-language newspaper Chinese Post (東方郵報) in its 1994 series titled ‘Australia, where is our place?’ (澳洲，我们的位置在哪里？). Ultimately, the paper demonstrates how ‘thick translation’, supported by a culture-sensitive metalanguage, can help promote understanding of unique perspectives across linguistic and cultural boundaries.