Understanding South Asians through Community Translation in Hong Kong: An Ethnographic Action Research Approach

Community translation plays a pivotal role in enabling migrants and local ethnic minorities who are not conversant in the lingua franca of the host society, i.e. linguistic minorities who speak minority languages. Studies on community translation, primarily situated in Western societies, have examined issues such as language policies (Córdoba Serrano and Diaz Fouces 2018) and modalities of community translation (Taibi and Ozolins 2016), and underscored the engagement of both professional and non-professional translators in such practice (García 2018). Nonetheless, scarce attention has been paid to the actual process of community translation and the identities of the linguistic minorities themselves. Situated in Hong Kong, this paper reports preliminary findings from a broader project that adopts an ethnographic action research methodology to investigate community translation engaged in by various stakeholders, including South Asian (SA) communities, many of whom are non-professional translators, project NGO partner, and trainee translators. We ask the question: How do SA participants understand their identity as played out during their interactions in collaborative community translation process? The paper begins with an introduction to the broader project, which commenced in 2021, and the social-political background in Hong Kong, where very little has been said about the status quo of community translation vis-à-vis Hong Kong’s linguistic minorities. We then discuss the overarching research methodology of ethnographic action research and its appropriateness for studying translation processes in relation to marginalised populations from four aspects: depth and length, a dual emic and etic perspective, data richness, and actual social impact. A reflection on the challenges of adopting such an approach will also be discussed. Our analysis of ethnographic fieldnotes, recordings of interactions between participants, and post-collaborative translation interviews reveals a dynamic between minority and majority language speakers and SA participants’ resistance to the dominant, controversial ‘ethnic minority’ identity narrative in Hong Kong’s public discourse.