Of Peninsulas and Archipelagos: The Landscape of Translation in Southeast Asia

Comprising 11 countries and hundreds of languages from one of the most culturally diverse regions in the world, the chapters in this collection explore a wide range of translation issues.

The subject of this volume is set in the contrasted landscapes of mainland peninsulas and maritime archipelagos in Southeast Asia, which, whilst remaining a largely minor area in Asian studies, harbors a wealth of textual heritage that opens to inquiries and new readings. From the post-Angkor Cambodia, the post-colonial Viantiane, to the ultra-modern Singapore metropolis, translation figures problematically in the modernization of indigenous literatures, criss-crossing chronologically and spatially through different literary landscapes. The peninsular geo-body gives rise to the politics of singularity as seen in the case of the predominant monolingual culture in Thailand, whereas the archipelagic geography such as the thousand islands of Indonesia allows for peculiar types of communication. Translation can also be metaphorized poetically to configure the transference in different scenarios such as the cases of self-translation in Philippine protest poetry and untranslatability in Vietnamese diasporic writings. The collection also includes intra-regional comparative views on historical and religious terms.

This book will appeal to scholars and postgraduate students of translation studies, sociolinguistics, and Southeast Asian studies.

Phrae Chittiphalangsri, has a PhD in Comparative Literature/Translation Studies from University College London, UK. She is Chairperson for the MA program in Translation at the Chalermprakiat Center of Translation and Interpretation (CCTI), faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand, and acts as co-vice president of IATIS since 2021.

Vicente L. Rafael, has a PhD in History from Cornell University. He is the Giovanni and Amne Costigan Endowed Professor of History at University of Washington, USA. Among his several notable books are Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society Under Early Spanish (1988), The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish Philippines (2005), and Motherless Tongues: The Insurgency of Language amid Wars of Translation (2016).