Beyond linguistic uniformity
By Tan Zi Hao

This article is a part of CHECK-IN 2024, our annual publication, which comes in at 313 pages this year. You can buy a limited-edition print copy at SGD38 here.

Two recent pronouncements on language, arising from incompatibly distinct scales of interest, have come to merit some consideration and reflection. Some of the threads of my reflection, presented below, underpin my recent projects as an artist working with language and translation.

Bilingual signage of SJK (C) Serdang Baru 1, a Chinese national-type primary school, where I undertook my primary education. Image courtesy of the artist.

The first is an acerbic charge by Malaysian linguist Teo Kok Seong, who accosts the Chinese vernacular schools for compromising the unity of the Malaysian public.¹ Vernacular schools, also called national-type primary schools in Malaysia, are government schools that employ non-official languages such as Mandarin and Tamil as the medium of instruction. Their existence has been a thorn in the eyes of Malay ethno-nationalists, who frown upon it as a nonfulfillment of their decolonial project, and a direct refusal from the ethnic minorities to fully integrate into the national body politic. This ethnocentric disapproval, however, is viewed by the ethnic minorities as a denial of basic diversity and their equal participation in the national body politic. The second, more international in scale, is the alluring prospect of Neuralink, an American neurotechnology company founded by Elon Musk, whose implantable brain-machine interface could eliminate the unwieldiness of our spoken languages, enabling more immediate communication through neural signals, bypassing our clumsy tongues. ²

Coming from worlds apart, both statements by Teo and Musk may seem to profess contradictory opinions on the subject of language. Different though they may be, the two are invested in an unlikely miracle a language is thought to perform: bridging divides. Whether it be a shared national language, or a universal metalanguage, speaking the same tongue, as these proponents would have us believe, removes barriers in communication. The precept is that linguistic variation is a cause of distress; confusion of tongues begets miscommunication, sows tension and distrust. This unfortunate presupposition, as old as the myth of Babel, has still not quite been eradicated. Today, it thrives even more strongly amid the tug of algorithmic large language models (LLMs), used in machine translation and generative AI technologies. Reliance on linguistic patterns in LLMs revivifies another form of linguistic determinism. So long as a language has a recognisable pattern, now taken as a universalisable code, every meaning becomes immediately translatable, transferable, disambiguated to the point of an either-or.

My main concern lies neither in the onrush of neurotechnology and its techno-linguistic regime, nor in the identitarianism of Teo, but in their diagnosis of language as a defect, for which the solution is, in the broadest sense of the term, translation. In their tendencies to bridge and connect, translation is enrolled in the service of homogeneity. The permutation of difference in these tendencies mirrors a politics of assimilation. Difference has to be evened out; nuances abstracted away. While it is undeniable that “there’s a lot of loss of information occurs when compressing a complex concept into words,”³ as Musk asserts, the point of contention is how language is scapegoated in this trite understanding of (mis)communication. Musk’s and Teo’s claims that language, or linguistic variation, impedes communication are often accompanied by an epistemic blindness trading on the idea that communicative immediacy is essentially achievable.

Together with my collective Huruf, guided typography tours are organised in Kuala Lumpur to foster historical awareness on the impact of language ideologies on our immediate surroundings. Image courtesy of Huruf.

What I am at pains to challenge is exactly this appeal of immediacy, which I consider as an appeal for conversion, intrinsic to dominant language and translation ideologies. The view that translation, or some forms of conversion, could lead to an idealised transparency of social relations, ignores the dialogic, generative, and anarchic aspects of language that contribute equally to sense-making. The figuring out of meaning and intentionality in a communication demands translation to give not only definite answers, but awkward queries and detours for critical introspection. Whenever language is used, incomprehensibility is often the rule rather than the exception. Everything, being at once translatable and untranslatable, is thus implicated in the Derridean paradox where translation is taken as both “necessary and impossible”.⁴ A degree of openness is herein warranted: translation becomes more than a mere bridge, but a mode of inquiry that disputes easy conversion of meanings and the premature closure of the irreducibly different.

Tan Zi Hao, ‘Xenophobic Malaysia, Truly Asia’, 2020, silkscreen on metal plate, 23 x 35.7cm each, edition of 5 + 1AP. Image courtesy of the artist.

Translation cannot accede to the demand of equivalence. Even if mimicry is indispensable to translation, it only amounts to a farce. The invisibility of the translator is not a given,⁵ but a patched-up wound from a collision. Meanings are not always captured and convertible in translation, but expanded, confronted, enriched. In my series of warning signs where I document contentious political vocabulary in Malaysia, certain keywords are deliberately mistranslated to dispel the myth of equivalence. In some cases, I aim for a disruptive translation, reminiscent of Tejaswini Niranjana’s thesis,⁶ to accentuate the case of untranslatability and the power asymmetry between languages in a given context. If translation invokes both the translatable and untranslatable, it is also a speculative experiment for imagining utopian and dystopian realities. Words from incongruent worlds would meet, shake hands or lock horns with one another, negotiate for a middle, albeit somewhat forced. Surely some loss of meaning is imminent, but by virtue of the translation process, a new relation is introduced, and from it, new commitments. “Translation is the most intimate act of reading,” writes Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.⁷ In this newfound intimacy, we gain a modest awareness that there is more than one language, more than one conception of the world. No singular language could therefore claim a universal authority to truth.⁸

“If translation invokes both the translatable and untranslatable, it is also a speculative experiment for imagining utopian and dystopian realities.”

One must rejoice in the wake of this humiliation.The Babel is no bane for the world. Rather, it compels us to account for and commit to others, it obliges us to word our world in other tongues, if we so seek to be understood. More importantly, this Babel situation is not confined to multilingual societies. Among interlocutors mouthing the same tongue, disparate supralinguistic languages and idioms, inflected through age, social class, gender, generational divide, exist. What distresses the prescriptivist To in multilingual Malaysia, is the same as that which frustrates the introverted entrepreneur Musk in his principally monolingual corporate environment. Language, in this regard, always already commits to a deferral of communication, just as it enables a consideration for care. For what else could we do in light of potential incomprehension and miscommunication, but to suspend our judgement?

Tan Zi Hao, installation view of ‘The Mercurial Inscription’, 2022, video animation, aluminium, touch sensor, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of Kenta Chai.

Tan Zi Hao, ‘The Mercurial Inscription’ (stills), 2022, video animation, aluminium, touch sensor, dimensions variable. Images courtesy of the artist.

To treat translation as answerable only to linguistic difference is unimaginative. The moment of intimacy implicit in any translational endeavour is an invitation to an open world. Translation injects a touch of tenderness in the formulaic pragmatism of a relay. I emphasise here the importance of touch—as I did in my installation ‘The Mercurial Inscription’ (2022), which is equipped with a touch sensor that activates translation—to draw attention to the necessity and impossibility of translation once more. Translation lends a willing ear, and a voice, to the other, but in turn, threatens us with the friction of contact. The ethics of care in translation provides grounds for empathic identification precisely because it jolts us into a curious relation of responsibility.To a large extent, translation is an affective response to difference. As we yearn to understand and be understood, we are given the condition for knowing ourselves otherwise, and for experiencing selfhood in alternate conceptions.

“To treat translation as answerable only to linguistic difference is unimaginative. The moment of intimacy implicit in any translational endeavour is an invitation to an open world.”

As patrons and interpreters of language, we are always already translating. Monolingual or multilingual notwithstanding, mastery of language belongs to myth.There is no guarantee that the language we find most habituated to is in our best interests. For once a thought reaches the tongue, a firm resolve wavers in the face of communication: what language and vocabulary, what syntactical and tonal variation, could our tongue possibly carry to make our thought perfectly legible and persuasive to others? We could bask in the confidence of our mastery, but mastery and suitability of language are not to be conflated. As far as we communicate and engage in languaging, we toil in the co-creation of meanings. An embattled discourse ensues as we pull each other to a middle. We must translate ourselves for others.

Tan Zi Hao's solo exhibition 'The Tongue Has No Bones' is on view at A+ Works of Art in Kuala Lumpur from 6 to 27 July 2024. More information here.

This article is a part of CHECK-IN 2024, our annual publication, which comes in at 313 pages this year. You can buy a limited-edition print copy at SGD38 here.

¹Hidayah Sani, “Penubuhan sekolah vernakular tidak boleh atasi sekolah kebangsaan, perlu dihadkan — Kok Seong,” The Merdeka Times, 28 February 2024, https://themerdekatimes.com/news/2024/02/penubuhan-sekolah-vernakular- tidak-boleh-atasi-sekolah-kebangsaan-perlu-dihadkan-kok-seong/.
²Joe Rogan, “Joe Rogan Experience #1470 – Elon Musk,” YouTube, 8 May 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcYjXbSJBN8&t=0s.
³Rogan.
⁴Jacques Derrida, “DesTours de Babel,” trans. Joseph F. Graham, in Joseph F. Graham (ed.), Difference in Translation (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), 165–207.
⁵Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History ofTranslation (London and NewYork: Routledge, 1995).
⁶Tejaswini Niranjana, Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Oxford: University of California Press, 1992).
⁷Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Politics of Translation,” in Outside in theTeaching Machine (London and NewYork: Routledge, 1993), 183.
⁸Barbara Cassin, “More Than One Language,” e-flux, March 2017, https://www.e- flux.com/journal/80/100018/more-than-one-language/.