Musings of an Old New Bird #02
Growing Up Between Two Languages
by Lim Woan Wen
In our first meeting for the apprenticeship, one of the first pieces of advice offered by my mentor Shelly Bryant was — learn to let go of your fear. Not an uncommon piece of life advice, although she was specifically referring to an embedded fear of having one’s translation work judged by people who were also bilingual, a trait she had found common among those who grew up in a bilingual environment, like me, as opposed to others who had learned their second languages as an adult, like her.
Now, having a fear of judgement from others is understandable, but attributing this specific fear to the plurality of one’s linguistic background is something I had never given thought to. I felt intrigued that here was someone who had a markedly different experience and relationship with the two languages I grew up speaking, and who clearly has a different perspective of the same landscape. Besides her professional skills and knowledge, perhaps this difference also provides her an unhindered view of blind spots I am unable to see?
While I know that many translators over the world work with second or third languages, I was suddenly made acutely aware that, for most of my life, I have indeed been surrounded mostly by people who also grew up bilingually. I started wondering about Shelly’s history as a native speaker of English who learned Chinese as a grownup outside of her home country, and the nuances that might elude me as someone born into a multilingual society.
I found some interesting answers in her ebook Between Two Languages: Understanding How Languages Relate to Each Other and What It Means for Translation, in which she shared anecdotes of differences she had discovered between native speakers and second language learners of both English and Chinese. She used these to illustrate that languages “are (often imperfect) means of expressing all that we encounter and experience,” and that “the two languages have no direct relationship at all, but instead only relate to one another through the intermediary of the things they are trying to express.”
As Shelly also puts it: “A child hears a word and learns not how its parts are put together, but how it corresponds to the world around her.” In a similar way, I believe that as a kid, I would have been shown the same fruit when learning its name in both English and Chinese, whether separately or simultaneously. I wonder though: how exactly did my tiny brain make sense of the difference as well as association between “an apple” and “一个苹果”, in relation to the same object?
It is not that I had never been aware of how language shapes a person, but when I pondered my own history using the fundamental principle — that languages relate to the world and not to each other — as a frame, I realised it helped me further understand why I function best when I am allowed to switch freely between English and Chinese. Even though I consider myself fluent in both languages, I often struggle ever so slightly to fully articulate myself if I were forced by circumstances to use only one of them. I used to think of it as a lack, but now it seems to me this can only be a logical result, given that I grew up navigating and relating to the world through two vastly different languages at the same time.
If I may picture monolingual adults as residents of a distinct, singular world with well-defined borders, and those who learn a second language as traveling to another clearly defined world, then I might describe the bilingual world I know of as an amalgamation of two (or even more, actually, in the case of Singapore) worlds where borders are blurry, ill-defined and often porous.
In another meeting with Shelly, immediately after informing her that Chinese is my stronger language, I had looked down at my work journal and realised, in amusement, that it was mostly written in English. Shelly attributed this to the fact that English is the “working” language in the education system that I studied in. She has a point there surely — I went home to check my personal diaries and the ratio there was much more even — yet I cannot help but feel there is more to it than that.
So, fuzzy as it is, what exactly is my relationship with these two languages? I doubt if I will ever find a single, clearly defined answer, but this process of relearning translation in a new context is certainly providing me a new lens to continue reflecting on the effect growing up between two languages has had on me.
©2022 Lim Woan Wen
Learn more about the Singapore Apprenticeship in Literary Translation here.
Lim Woan Wen began her apprenticeship through the Singapore Apprenticeship in Literary Translation (SALT) programme, co-organised by the Singapore Book Council and Tender Leaves Translation, in June 2022. She only started flexing her translation muscles again during the pandemic, after a gap of two decades.
For the last twenty years or so, she has established herself in the theatre as a lighting designer, and has lit more than 200 projects, won multiple awards, and co-founded the design collective INDEX. She was conferred the Young Artist Award in 2011 by the National Arts Council, and made a site-specific and time-based installation Light Matters in collaboration with the sun, in the following year.
Born and bred in Singapore, she is fluent in English, Mandarin and Singlish, proficient in Cantonese, understands Hokkien, and speaks a smattering of Japanese, Malay, and Vietnamese.