Prof. Yip Ka
Assistant Professor, Department of Translation, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
In the autumn of 2004 I took an introductory linguistics course at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. The first lesson was about what a language is. The gist was that the words people speak and the characters they write always share some degree of common ground, which linguists call “mutual intelligibility”; and that, looking across history, whether the speech of a community counts as a language or a dialect is, more often than not, not a question for linguistics but a political one. So is Cantonese a language or a dialect? The class had local, mainland and international students, each with a different background and their own views, and there were undercurrents, more or less. Among my classmates then was Thomas Tsoi (Wai-chuen), who had just moved from the Department of Physics to linguistics, and who is the translator of this book. Zoe Lam, the other soul behind the Cantonese edition of The Little Prince, was the teaching assistant who ran our tutorials.
Wai-chuen has always had an uncommon amount of energy. For the final paper of a linguistics course, others would dutifully write about a single phenomenon in a single language; he used quantitative and qualitative analysis together to discuss how onomatopoeia works across the languages of the world. As a secondary-school teacher in Hong Kong, others had to juggle teaching, administration and their own further study and ended up exhausted; he took never-ending piles of marking around the world, and finally came back from South Africa with The Little Prince, ten years in the making and at last complete, and with it a remarkable experiment: Cantonese really can be used to render works of literature.
Translating foreign works into Cantonese has a long history in Hong Kong. Prof. Lai Tsui-chun, Honorary Professor of Translation at Hong Kong Baptist University, has translated many English plays into Cantonese scripts that can be both read and performed, and they have become classics; the Cantonese versions of Disney’s animated films have not only expressive dialogue but lyrics that can be sung, each line matching the original song; and as for the dubbing teams of the big television stations, to us translators they are all hidden masters of translation. Seen this way, the Cantonese Little Prince is no accident, and not only the product of Wai-chuen’s passion. It belongs to a long tradition of translation practice that, in the meeting and collision of languages, keeps testing the vitality of Cantonese and its expressive potential, to prove that our mother tongue is truly a language that can be spoken, written and passed on.
History offers many precedents of translation establishing the standing of a language. Around the time ancient Rome conquered ancient Greece, one of its main tasks was to translate Greek philosophical knowledge into Latin, absorbing a civilisation while building a national language; at the time of the Reformation, many European thinkers translated the Bible into vernacular versions that women, children and villagers could all read, which also gave their own languages new life. For translation majors at Hong Kong’s universities these facts are probably common knowledge, but few can draw the parallel and ask what they themselves could do for Cantonese. I have worked in translation for years and even teach it, and I am still discussing with my students whether Cantonese can go into written translation; every time readership, writing conventions and the publishing environment come up, I tread nervously and cannot let go. For that alone, the Cantonese Little Prince is enough to make me blush. During the translation Wai-chuen often told me that all he asked was for the book to be published smoothly, and that it would be even better if Little Prince fans everywhere bought it to collect. But in my view the Cantonese Little Prince is by no means a “better than nothing” (有就得，好過冇) book; it is a bold work that gives you more the more you read it (越睇越有).