Choreographies of Multilingualism

Tong King Lee is Associate Professor of Translation at the University of Hong Kong. He was Luce-East Asia Fellow at the U.S. National Humanities Center (2020-2021) and holds several professional qualifications and appointments, including NAATI-Certified Translator (Australia), Chartered Linguist (UK), and Specialist at the Hong Kong Council for the Accreditation of Academic and Vocational Qualifications. He is the author of Translation and Translanguaging (2019), Applied Translation Studies (2018), and Experimental Chinese Literature (2015), and the editor of The Routledge Handbook of Translation and the City (2021).

• AcknowledgementsAbbreviationsChapter One: IntroductionChapter Two: Spectacles of Multilingualism: Reading the Semiotic LandscapeChapter Three: Quadrilingualism as Method: Literary Anthologies and other Cultural Literacy EventsChapter Four: Ludifying English: Singlish as Ideological CritiqueChapter Five: Multicultural Fantasies from Below: SingPoWriMo and Citizen PoetryChapter Six: Beyond the Divide: Towards a Postmultilingual SingaporeIndex

An uplifting and inspirational look at the power and provocation of multilingualism. Through a deeply engaged investigation of written public language in Singapore, Lee shows how multilingualism can simultaneously function as a tool to undergird institutional initiatives, a resource for spirited resistance, and a lively performance, emergent across time and around the globe, to help us all simultaneously reaffirm and reinvent our world. Read this book and contemplate, in fascination, how we speak, write, and read multiple languages to both make that world and make our way through it.