Translating oral histories: a podcast

• Main Author: Wong, Melissa Xin Yu
• Other Authors: -
• Format: Thesis-Master by Coursework
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2023
• Subjects: Humanities::History::Asia::Singapore::Politics and government; Humanities::Language::Chinese
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/168381
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Oral histories provide a rich resource anyone looking to gain new perspectives on historical events. The source text in this capstone project are four podcast episodes from “The Unlocking Podcast” featuring Lin Mui Lan, the wife of someone who was detained during Operation Coldstore; Lin herself was also an active participant in the political scene. Through the Chinese-English translation of this podcast, this project examines how a translation can respect the original voice of the speaker. The project identifies the main challenge as maintaining the casual and informal tone of conversation in a textual form. This is done with a number of approaches: retaining the shorter clauses and sentences of the Chinese source text; translating oral features and other pieces of non-verbal communication; keeping and inserting discourse participles from both Chinese and Singlish to modulate the tone and build consensus; and editorial insertions. In particular, the last approach of editorial insertions renders the translator visible, a deliberate decision made to both respect the original speaker and to remind readers that someone else has shaped the stories being presented.