The teaching and testing of translation in Hong Kong

The test of a product is in its reception by the market. To the extent that the translation of pragmatic texts is the main activity of the professional translator, there is apparently no better assessment of his or her performance, and the performance of their trainers, than the service they are able to provide to the community that employs them. Not so, however, when that community still regards translation, literary or pragmatic, as no more than a secondary copy despite the manifest need for equally effective versions in two languages, and when translation, effective or not, is not counted as scholarship, not even the scholarship of these translator-trainers. I will argue in this paper that the failure of translation as it is traditionally taught and practiced in Hong Kong is evident retrospectively in the way our last British Governor failed to get himself understood in Chinese translation by the local population, let alone the PRC officials. The need for effective bilingual communication is recognized in postcolonial Hong Kong with the SAR government hiring professional writers in both English and Chinese to sell its policies and the popular trend for public commentators, bilingual or not, to publish their views in both languages. I will discuss the ways in which these bilingual texts compare with translations and how the teaching of translation may be informed by such bilingualism. In my conclusion I will make a few suggestions as to how an undergraduate programme in translation may be best designed both to meet the demands of the translation market and the intellectual needs of its students in the linguistic context of Hong Kong.