So Classical As It Is: A Critical Study of the Cantonese Translation of Literary Chinese Course Texts in Hong Kong Language

Abstract

This paper aims to examine the Cantonese translation of the Literary Chinese texts in the featured book, and seeks to answer the following research questions: (1) Does the Cantonese translation of Literary Chinese prescribed texts in Hong Kong Language serve the purpose of making this “classical variant” of written Chinese more easily accessible to Hong Kong learners of the Chinese language? (2) Is such use of Cantonese script a viable replacement of the conventional Standard Modern Chinese translation, as claimed by the books’ authors? The current research is a document study based upon a close examination of selected texts from Hong Kong Language, which are triangulated with other works of the same genre/purpose and scholarly literature for further analysis using critical discourse analysis (CDA).The findings show that clear, precise, accurate Cantonese translations, like their counterparts in Standard Modern Chinese, in theory serves the purpose of making Literary Chinese more accessible to learners of the Chinese language speaking Cantonese as their mother tongue. Close to the verbal instructions given by teachers in Cantonese-medium Chinese language classrooms, the revision notes written in the Cantonese script presents verbatim correspondence to the imagined or mimicked teacher talk, and the explications matches the native speakers’ everyday language and local life. Nevertheless, such input would only be effective if the learners possess passive literacy of the Cantonese script,