mm. this entry from yawning bread made it onto language hat.

i agree broadly with what is said - but some of it just makes me very cross. i do agree, especially about how singaporeans make decisions about what language to use based on quick assumptions we make about the people we speak to. is. when i get into a cab i always take a moment to decide - is the driver malay or indian? i'll speak english. if he is chinese, does he look like he is english or chinese ed? what radio station does he have on. is he old? yes, would hokkien would be preferred to mandarin? (sometimes they decide for you, if they say something like, keh toh lor? in which case i launch into a terrible teochew stammer about where i want him to keh. that of course involves them having made a quick assessment of you too - they hardly ever speak hokkien to me - and i imagine a malay driver would speak malay to an older malay person getting into the cab.)

on the other hand, it's all written from a very english-ed perspective, isn't it? the fact is that singaporean chinese speakers do often know the chinese names and use them regularly when speaking in chinese. i can only conduct a straw poll of my friends, nearly all of whom are english-ed, but i doubt if any of them would not have know ya long was geylang. choonping will have one or two things to say about it. it's very much a matter of exposure, isn't it? if the woman had wanted to go to hong mao qiao or wujie lu i'm sure he would known it was angmokio and orchard. and if people can't always remember lakeside is hu pan, that is because people don't often get off at lakeside. nus students probably know very well clementi is jinwentai when they hear it even if they don't use it in their own speech. (and the reverse is also true. there was a time, and not very long ago either, that the taxi drivers couldn't take you to the esplanade. and very few people in my generation would still call the place you find the army camp neesoon. it's yishun. names take time.) of course i take his general point that the english names are the ones in common use - and that sometimes, i might even concede many times, we do not know other placenames. i for instance couldn't tell you what buona vista or telok blangah are. but i can also say that if i don't know them, it more often is precisely because they're transliterated rather than translated. i don't have many occasion to tell people i'm going to queenstown or redhill, but i can remember it is nu huang zheng and hongshan. moreover, to the chinese-educated, the transliterations are extremely ugly, meaningless and cringeworthy. this complaint comes up in the chinese papers quite regularly. what the heck does bodong baxi mean, even if it does sound like potong pasir? and i'm much happier that we do call pasir ris baisha even if that name has been replaced officially by the silly baxili.

the example cited from the chinese map is also unfair, deceptive and of course,the suggestion that only transliterations are used is impracticable. in the chinese case the names are in chinese to begin with, and there is a standardised romanisation system in hanyu pinyin. in anycase pinyin's relationship to spoken mandarin is not a simple transliteration; it is very nearly a tautology. even if you were to want to do this in singapore you could not easily, because place names in singapore come from english, malay, hokkien &c. and what does transliteration guarantee anyway? when i tried out the yalong example on minyin she identified geylang immediately, but said to me that she can confuse kallang, geylang and jurong (jia leng, ya long, yu lang respectively) and, given all of this, the chinese place-naming system in singapore is quite consistent, as a matter of fact:

if it is in english and can be translated it is translated (queenstown - nv huang zhen, east coast - dong hai an)
if it is an english proper name, it is tranliterated (thomson - tangsen, braddell - bu lai de) this is standard practice for names.
if it is in malay - it is likewise transliterated (potong pasir - botongbaxi, bukit timah - wuji zhima. they don't translate it as [whatever timah means in malay] hill)
if it has a dialect name, it is rendered in the same chinese characters and pronounced in mandarin (ang mo kio - hong mao qiao, yio chu kang - yang cuo gang (hi cindy!))
and of course there are exceptions - marine parade is malingbailie. bukit merah is hongshang, not wuji meila. but on the whole, the system is remarkably consistent.

he criticises what he considers the inaccurate translation of station names, pointing out, for instance, that 联邦 doesn't mean commonwealth but federal. that comes of assuming a one-to-one relationship in translation. 联邦 is the standard translation of federal, and it is in this context that it is most frequently used. that doesn't mean 联邦 translates back only into federal.commonwealth in the singapore context would refer to the british commonwealth, and the official name for the british commonwealth is 英联邦. of course the commonwealth of nations is not technically a 联邦 but a 邦联, but it is still historically the 英联邦. he says marina bay should not be bin hai wan because that means seafront bay. what is marina, but that which is related to the sea? is he thinking about boat docks specifically, when he objects to binhai? translations of names are never, in any case, exact, but equivalent. if it conveys the correct idea or evokes a certain image to speakers of the target language, then it is meaningful. it is also a typically english-ed attitude to think that english names come first and all other versions of names are derivative translations. zhengfu dasha, another name he criticises, does not mean government mansion. da sha has a wider semantic range than mansion. and in the way the author tries to imply - and yes, there are lots of government buildings about, but if a chinese speaker were looking for the ministry of education or defence - they would ask for jiaoyu bu or guo fang bu. i quite understand if the fear is that zhengfu dasha becomes confused with the istana (called government house in the colonial era) but city hall station serves the city hall, the padang, the supreme court - they are the central administrative headquarters and would have been the most important government buildings at one time. and given that this is one of the earliest and still major interchanges on the mrt line and in the early days of the mrt you would have heard the four-language announcement to change trains. even if you didn't use it in your own speech, you probably can recall it.

more than one name can be attached to a single area. do you call the area around the women's hospital tekka, zhujiao, or kendang kebau? the point is that we are able to hold more than one name for the same place in our minds. if you can tell dongjing and tokyo are one and the same or hiroshima and guangdao i don't know what the big deal is about yalong and geylang. i take the point of course that tourists should take an effort with the local language, but locals the traditional and rigid division of languages down racial lines was unfair policy. and nobody should be forced to be bilingual if they don't want to be. but while english is the lingua franca, there are four official languages, there are other language communities, and there are bilinguals and trilinguals. other languages are not there merely to serve as translations. individual lack of knowledge and the prejudices of the monolingual anglocentric speech community repackaged as a rant about translation logic is not only factually inaccurate and unconstructive, but also not in good taste.