Translators' notes

Translators' Notes begins and departs with PIDGIN: interrupted transmission (2001), a multi-vocal, multi-screen sound and video installation by Singapore-born, British-based artist, Erika Tan. As a collection of my sometime artist-writer-translator's notes - on translators' notes - this article tracks the release and flutter of pigeons/pidgins across 'contact zones'. Aerial diversions and oral digressions, provoking and provoked by territorial skirmishes, point to some of the concerns and tactics of diasporic artist-contemporaries practising between Britain and Hong Kong. Engaging issues around the politics and poetics of speaking and translating 'poorly', the assertion of political power and authority via linguistic 'standards', the conflation of linguistic competence with cultural and ethnic 'authenticity', and the particular role or 'business' of 'Chinglish' in the construction of pre- and post-handover Hong Kong identities, as well as representations and contestations of 'China' and the "West', the author concludes with a proposition: that the peculiar insights and sites of 'pidgin' may enable us to better recognize the inevitability, and pleasures, of 'pidgin' cultures.