Emerging from the Linguistic Divide: Wayson Choy’s Self-Translation into the Other in Paper Shadows: A Chinatown Childhood
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Salman Rushdie's Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991 has made familiar the view of immigrants as translated men (and women) (17). Borne across the world (the word 'translation' comes, etymologically, from the Latin for 'bearing across'), migrants are commonly seen as people in indeed often in translation, as Eva Hoffman's famous autobiography has suggested (Imaginary Homelands 17). Rushdie challenges the common view that always gets lost in and instead he cling[s], obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained (17). Rushdie's observation suggests that the concept of should be explored in new ways in order to identify not just what gets lost in the translating process bur also what new layers of meaning can be added to personal narratives about migrations across different linguistic and cultural spheres. In her introduction to Changing the Terms: Translating in the Postcolonial Era, Sherry Simon explains that [w]e increasingly understand cultural interaction not merely as a form of exchange bur as production. Translation then is not simply a mode of linguistic transfer but a translingual practice, a writing across languages[,] which permits new kinds of conversations and new positions (28). The migrant writers located in these new speaking positions draw on linguistic processes such as abrogation, hybridization, and creolization and combine autobiography, biography, historiography, ethnography, and fiction in order to articulate complex translations that challenge the very notion of authority and authenticity of original sources. Such a challenge, Simon suggests, proposes translation [as] a necessary means through which knowledge is tested, recontextualized, submitted to critical scrutiny (Changing the Terms 27). Reading the personal narratives of language migrants (1) there- fore constitutes a form of that enables audiences to test and recontextualize the various forms of knowledge that migrant autobiographers produce. The decision to explore the linguistic aspect of the migration experience for this paper emerges from my own difficulties with living in I emigrated from France twelve years ago and although I arrived in Anglophone Canada with a fairly decent grasp of English, I am reminded daily of my various linguistic limitations. Having to negotiate daily life in a foreign language is often alienating and disempowering and raises practical questions about finding the tight words to express oneself accurately, modulating one's voice properly, and mustering enough energy to follow fast-paced conversations. It also generates intellectual concerns and existential angst because one is not simply manipulating a foreign language, one is also undergoing identity translation. Speaking another language displaces the mother tongue and changes who one is even if one is not quite aware of it. When I go back home, feeling that what I call my French self is as I remember it to be the day I left my country, I read incomprehension in my father's eyes as he is trying to get re-acquainted with his now foreign daughter. I make my mother laugh when I describe to her what a washing machine does because I have forgotten the word for washer in French. When I fight with my sister, I know that I have lost the argument when she walks away telling me that I can no longer understand her because I have become too Canadian. How can I be too Canadian when I still feel so French? How can what I see as my French self be disappearing with all the preservation work that I have been doing? Of course, the distance that now exists between my family and me is the result of years of separation and distance both geographical and temporal, but it also has a lot to do with the fact that I can now read them in two languages and that I have become a bilingual text that they are trying to decipher with only one language. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".