Reflections on Hong Kong's 'culture of translation'

As all translators know, the translation of a weather bulletin between languages of the developed world cannot compare with the translation of cultural texts. Whereas in the former there is always already a well-tried technical glossary for communicating the factual information, the same cannot be said of the latter which is essentially the translation of a different cultural experience. The translation of culture is motivated for the most part by the attraction to the foreign, and it becomes an even greater challenge when both translator and audience are far removed from that culture perceived to be the more advanced or interesting, and worthy of emulation or sharing, if not intellectual understanding as well. The enthusiasm for the “translation of culture” as such is what I will examine in this paper, following the view of a noted cultural critic of Hong Kong, has led to the growth in postwar Hong Kong of a “culture of translation”. We as a society are apparently open to the popular cultural products of the capitalist West, which we are keen to copy and appropriate as our own, but is there any depth to the consumer society that we have become, and the “capitalist” lifestyle that many of us have come to embrace as our own?