Remapping the translation policies in China: contributions from Macau

Abstract

Translation policy, although an essential topic in the domain of language policy, has been understudied in China. Macau, as the earliest encounter point between the western and oriental cultures in Modern China, has been undeservingly neglected in this aspect, although its translation activities have never been interrupted since the Ming Dynasty. As such, this article sets out to trace the development of the translation policy in Macau (from its establishment to its handover to China in 1999). In particular, we will focus on tracing the historical evolution and development of the translation policy in Macau in the time span of over 400 years since the Portuguese establishment in 1557. The purpose is to cast a critical eye on its experiences in translation policymaking, using examples from official regulations, existing studies, and bibliometric data. We reconceptualize translation policy to entail the aspects of translation management, translation practices, and beliefs. Overall, the translation policy of Macau contributes to remapping the translation policy of China as important footnotes to the fuller picture of several essential historical periods.

Introduction

Policy refers to the conduct of political and public affairs by a formal government and government agency, or by an informal setting, like an institution, an organization, or an administration. The policy practice includes translation policy. Following a similar stretch, translation policy covers a variety of meaning, including official institutional settings, and other informal settings, like translation strategies, tactics, guiding principles, and ideology (Meylaerts, 2011b). Decisions related to translation policy are made by translators, interpreters, and publishers. Translation policy is now an essential topic in the domain of language policy and has received increasing attention in China (Li et al., 2017). Li et al. (2017) described China's translation policy in modern China (1949-present) and argued that the translation policy in modern China during the Hanyu monolingual period (1957–1977) was characterized by assimilationism and monolingualism and that translation policies during the first and second multilingual stages (1949–1957 and 1978-present) were characterized by multilingualism at both the national and local levels. In addition, China's multilingualism emphasizes the promotion of Mandarin Chinese, which is considered a prerequisite for social integration and national unity. There is one point that we may need to highlight here: this descriptive study focused merely on the Chinese mainland. The two SARS of Hong Kong and Macau, de facto, can be considered two fundamental footnotes of the translation policy of the whole of China (Li & Tong, 2020; Han & Wen, 2022). The case of Macau deserves special mention since its colonization has been a polemic issue and its handover was called handover of administration instead of sovereignty.

Of the two SARs of China, Macau is the earliest encounter place of western and oriental cultures in Modern China, where translation activities have never been interrupted since the Ming Dynasty. The first Occidental University, Saint Paul's College, in the far east of Asia, was created in Macau. The first institutional translation organization (Repartição dos Assuntos Sínicos) was created in the middle of the nineteenth century, almost at the same time as The School of Combined Learning, or the Tongwen Guan (Chinese: 同文館) in Beijing. However, due to its limited geographical and populational size, as well as its very reduced economic impact on national and international stages in recent centuries, Macau has been undeservingly neglected. As such, the present article sets out to investigate the translation policy of Macau (from its establishment to the present) to cast a critical eye on its experiences in translation policymaking, mapping its five stages with milestone examples from official regulations, existing studies, and bibliometric data, in light of the conceptualization of translation policy by González Núñez (2013) and by Meylaerts (2009, 2011a, b, 2013) in terms of translation management, translation practices and beliefs.

The rationale for translation policy in Macau

Macau has been a multilingual society since its establishment in 1557, with Chinese overlapping with multilingualism in Portuguese, Malay, Japanese, English, Korean, Catalo, and other foreign languages. Research on the languages spoken in Macau has undergone a period of rapid quantitative and qualitative development from 1980 to 2009 (Leong, 2013, p. 105), and some studies have focused on the use of different languages in Macau: on the use of English (e.g., Bolton, 1992; Harrison, 1984; Mann & Wong, 1999; Moody, 2008, 2021), Portuguese (e.g., Escaleira, 2013; Han, 2017; Li, 2016; Paiva, 2008; Pina, 2013), Cantonese (e.g., Sio, 2003) and Patuá (e.g., Ansaldo & Matthews, 2004; Zhang, 2008; Zheng, 1999), as well as on the use of Mandarin and other languages. Although Portuguese has been the official language in the history of Macau, as well as one of the official languages of the MSAR (since 1999), the study of Portuguese usage has registered a rather limited number (Yan & Moody, 2010). To provide a comprehensive review of the sociolinguistic literature of Macau, featured by multilingualism, this article focuses on language policy, especially translation policy. As argued by Meylaerts, “At the heart of multilingualism, we find translation. Translation is not taking place in between monolingual realities but rather within multilingual realities” (2013, p. 537). This inseparable relationship between multilingualism and translation places translation policy as an essential and inevitable topic of multilingualism. Macau, with its multilingual practices over centuries and as one of the most complex and dynamic spaces of multilingualism, needs to be given special attention.

According to Meylaerts (2011b), translation policy is a set of legal rules implemented by governments and other institutional organizations to “regulate translation in fields of education, legal affairs, political institutions, media, and administration” (p. 165). In future development by González Núñez (2013), who built up his theory based on Spolsky (2012, p. 5)’s definition of language policy, translation is considered a term that encompasses translation practices, translation beliefs, and translation management. Translation practices refer to actual practices in a speech community, which can involve issues such as the types of texts that are translated, the language from or into which texts are translated, the place where translation takes place, and the like. Translation beliefs are the values assigned by members of a linguistic community to translation practices for particular linguistic groups. Translation management refers to “decisions regarding translation practices made by people in authority” (González Núñez, 2013, p. 476). This theory was further explored by Jazini (2021), who suggested taking into account reception in translation policy. This reception perspective sheds light on the study of policy receivers, which should be further explored in subsequent research. As Li et al. (2017) used the conceptualization of González Núñez (2013) in mapping China's minority language translation policies (1949-present) from a top-down perspective, we adopt the same theoretical rationale of multilingualism and reconceptualize translation policy to revisit the LPP/translation policy of Macau.

Here, it is worth mentioning translation management, which is closely associated with people in authority. This means that even in a multilingual society with multilingual practices and beliefs, translation management can be different since it is conducted through a top-down approach. To better understand translation management, we use the four prototypes of Meylaerts (2009, 2011a, b, 2013), who advances in terms of the communication of national authorities with their citizens, namely:

• 1. Complete institutional monolingualism—one language regulates communication between authorities and citizens in education and public settings.

• 2. Complete institutional multilingualism with obligatory multidirectional translation in all languages for all—the overall translation strategy guarantees absolute institutional equality of all languages and speakers.

• 3. Intermediate strategy: a linguistic and translational territoriality regime characterized by institutional monolingualism combined with occasional and temporary translation into the minority languages.

• 4. Combination of the second and third, institutional monolingualism at the local level and institutional multilingualism with multidirectional obligatory translation at the superior (e.g., federal) level. (Meylaerts, 2013, pp. 544–555).

This prototype proposed by Meylaerts (2013) envisions the potential impact of a given translation or nontranslation as a “means of oppression” or “attempt for emancipation" (p. 546) and provides an institutional perspective in reviewing the complexity of the translation policy of Macau and tackles the core issue of translation/non-translation in multilingualism that runs through the whole history of Macau. As such, we will resort to the above-mentioned conceptual constituents of translation policy as well as the classification of translation management to argue how the translation policy of Macau contributes to the fuller picture of China's translation policy.

Historical translation policy of Macau and milestones

Translation policy refers to “a set of legal rules implemented by governments and other institutional organizations to regulate translation in fields of education, legal affairs, political institutions, media, and administration” (Meylaerts, 2011b, p. 165). This nature of translation policy directs our attention to a top-down perspective, focusing on institutional practices as well as the attitudes of decision-makers in authority. When applied to the specific situation of Macau, its official languages, their status, and their usages should be fully studied and considered. Although there is some pessimistic view about Portuguese, which was considered not fulfilling any exclusive functions except symbolic functions (Moody, 2008, who advances the declaration of Macau English), we are holding different positions since in the past, Portuguese mapped the diverse sociolinguistic realities of Macau. At present, by enjoying the official language status conferred by the Basic Law of MSAR, Portuguese continues to be obligatorily used in official occasions, such as the Legislative Council debate, news release conferences, and the Chief Executive's Policy Address, among other education, legal affairs, media, political institutions, and administration. In addition, the positioning of Macau as a platform between China and the Portuguese-speaking countries has placed Portuguese in unprecedented significance in the whole history of Macau. In the future, with the belt and road initiative and the construction of the Greater Bay Area, Portuguese will continue to be one key tenet in the language planning and translation planning of the GBA and China.

However, regarding the specific translation policy of Macau, we agree with Yan and Moody (2010), who point out that it is not easy to give a definite answer to language policy in Macau due to its complexity of a multilingual and multicultural society in different historical periods. Previous studies (Chen, 2005; Ching, 2003; Ieong, 1994; Mann & Wong, 1999; Sheng, 1994, 1999, 2004) made the event Handover the division point, paying special attention to the effects of the Basic Law of Macau Special Administrative Regions of the People's Republic of China and tackling the relationship among Chinese, Portuguese and English in language planning. The language education issue of Portuguese is also addressed by Chinese scholars (Xue, 1998) by pointing out the failure of Portuguese education in Macau because there is little attention by local Chinese toward Portuguese. This failure is mainly due to the laissez-faire and indifferent attitudes of the Portuguese administration toward language policy (Li & Tong, 2020, p. 155). This attitude might go through the whole Portuguese administration until the proximities of the handover of Macau to China.

To give a whole picture of the Translation Policy of Macau and take into account its time span of over 400 hundred years, we propose a periodization of the translation policy of Macau until 1999. Our periodization is different from that of Moody (2021), who mapped the linguistic history of Macau in three periods, but from an Anglophone perspective: (1) 1557–1639, Macau experienced dynamic growth and development as Portugal conducted highly lucrative trade between China and Japan; (2) 1640–1842, Portuguese influence throughout Asia began to wane and Macau became an international hub of European colonial activity in China; and (3) 1843–1999, the establishment of a British colony in Hong Kong diminished the international importance of Macau and drained multilingual resources from the city. Instead, our classification is based on that of Manuela Paiva (2008), further developed by Han (2017), who mapped the translation history of Macau from 1557 until 1992.

Manuela Paiva (2008, p. 4), former dean of the Faculty of Languages and Translation of Macau Polytechnic University, categorized the history of translation in Macau before 1915 into three periods. The first period was from 1557 to 1626, when the activities of the interpreters in the early commercial activities—jurubaça and língua—were not regulated; the second period was from 1626 to 1865, when the Portuguese government gradually intervened in the interpretation tasks with the Qing government; and the third period was from 1865 to 1915, when the Portuguese government established the Department of Chinese Affairs (1886–1945) and the Chinese School (1905/1915–1976) to manage the external negotiations and internal Chinese affairs and began formally training Chinese- Portuguese bilingual talents.

Since Manuela Paiva's periodization terminated at the beginning of the twentieth century, Han (2017) added two more key periods of translation in Macau: (1) from 1915 to 1976 (fourth period) and (2) from 1976 to 1992 (fifth period). The year 1976 was considered a turning point, when with the reorganization of governmental departments, as a consequence of the approval and implementation of the Organic Statute of Macau by the Portuguese Administration, the Chinese school was renamed "technical school", and reforms also occurred in teaching pedagogy.

In this article, we optimize Han's periodization by incorporating more historical studies and discoveries, especially in the early stages of the period. Each period has its milestone events, featured by institutional interferences, characterized translation practices, and multifaceted beliefs, attitudes, and ideologies. We would also extend the fifth period to 1999.

Basically, we have the following stages:

Stage 1: 1557–1626: the activities of the interpreters in the early commercial activities—jurubaça and língua—were not regulated.

Stage 2: 1626–1865: (1) the Chinese and Portuguese administrations gradually intervened in the translation and interpretation tasks with (a) Regimento da Lingua da Cidade, e dos Jurubaças Menores e Escrivaens (1627) and (b) Aomen Jilue (澳門記略), Monograph of Macau (1751); (2) colonialization in 1846, when Portuguese Governor Ferreira do Amaral displaced Qing government officials and formally asserted Portuguese jurisdiction in Macau.

Stage 3: 1865–1915: the Portuguese administration launched a series of initiatives in institutionalizing translation and interpreting: (1) Division of Chinese Language Interpreting (1865–1885); (2) Department of Chinese Affairs (1885–1945); (3) Chinese School (1905/1915–1976).

Stage 4: 1915–1975: the most systematic and dynamic multilingual practices in the history of Macau: (1) institutional translation and interpreting in Chinese schools; (2) Media multilingual practices (Mosaico, Renascimento); (3) Mediation by the elite of Macanese.

Stage 5: 1976–1999: the gradual change of translation directionality: (1) Organic Statue of Macau (1976); (2) Technical School (1976–1992); (3) Joint declaration, with localization measures; (4) Translation integrated into Higher Education in 1991.

The first multilingual stage (1557–1626)

As the meeting point of maritime trading activities and commerce since the first arrival of Portuguese traders in 1513, Macau was the most important port in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in South Asia. After the Portuguese were allowed to permanently settle in Macau by the Ming emperor in 1557, the Portuguese were never numerous (numbering just 900 in 1583 and 1200 out of 26,000 in 1640). It quickly became an important node in the development of Portugal's trade along three major routes: Macau–Malacca–Goa–Lisbon, Guangzhou–Macau–Nagasaki, and Macau–Manila–Mexico. The Guangzhou–Macau–Nagasaki route was particularly profitable because the Portuguese acted as middlemen, shipping Chinese silks to Japan and Japanese silver to China, pocketing huge markups in the process. In the Portuguese maritime expansion, Macau participated in the process of globalization, when the Malays, Indians, and the Philippines gathered together in Macau. Although during most of the Ming Empire and in the early Qing Empire with the embargo on maritime trade policies, the Ming and Qing governments were happy with the role of the Portuguese in keeping pirates off the south China coast, the grant of settlement in Macau to Portuguese provided them with a unique lucrative trade between China and Japan (Van Dyke, 2005, 2011).

In these circumstances, when trade was the priority, there were a group of people, local agents—mainly traders and service personnel who spoke Cantonese or a Yue dialect of Guangdong Province as their vernacular—gradually picked up some "broken Portuguese" to do business with and meet the practical needs of Portuguese merchants and sailors. In addition to local agents, some who practiced the broken Portuguese from the diaspora of Southeast Asians were called "Jurubaça” (of origin Malay) and “Língua” (Paiva, 2008; Pina, 2013; Escaleira, 2013; Li, 2016; Han, 2017). Over time, their broken Portuguese evolved into Macau Portuguese Pidgin (MPP). For approximately 100 years until the 1830s, the MPP served as the lingua franca within the Chinese-Portuguese trading community, including in Guangzhou (Canton) (Li & Tong, 2020).

This first period of Macau indicates the translation and interpreting activities conveying the trading business, but in terms of translation management, there was no strong governance either from the Ming or Qing Dynasty Government or from the Portuguese administration. The coexistence of all the languages, Cantonese, Portuguese, broken Portuguese, and other languages, was greatly booming the globalized business.

The second multilingual stage (1627–1864) and milestones

This stage is characterized by the gradual intervention of the translation and interpreting tasks by both Chinese and Portuguese governance. This period witnessed some important institutional regulations and documents either from Portuguese Governance or Qing Governance. These documents exercised their institutional functions as regulation tools and show the multilingual practices in Macau society. This balanced situation was destroyed by the colonialization event in 1846 when the Portuguese Governor Ferreira does Amaral displaced Qing government officials and formally asserted Portuguese jurisdiction in Macau.

The first institutional document was Regimento da Lingua da Cidade, e dos Jurubaças Menores e Escrivaens (Regulation of city Lingua, young Jurubaças, and Escrivaens), issued in 1627, which intended to discipline and normalize the activity and action of the Lingua, Jurubaças, and Escrivaens, since Macau was concerned with political communication and the power was largely based on the information that was available to each of the parties and, therefore, depended on specialists in oral and written communication.

From Qing governance, the most important document about the language policy of Macau is Aomen Jilue (澳門記略; Monograph of Macau/Abridged record of Macau, 1751). The Monograph of Macau is a local chronicle dedicated to Macau. It is the first ancient book that systematically introduces Macau into the history of the world and China. The work was compiled by two Qing Mandarins, Yin Guangren and Zhang Rulin, and both were sent to investigate Macau to give a comprehensive picture of the territory with which Qing enjoyed sovereignty. The book was completed in 1751.

The authors of Monograph of Macau collected a large amount of first-hand information about Macau by means of visiting the islands, listening to people’s petition, and searching for records. The monograph introduces the history, geography, Chinese and Western culture, customs and folk skills of Macau, with 21 frames of illustrations and more than 400 Chinese-Portuguese words and phrases.

This rarity of official records of Macau proves, on the one hand, the preciousness of the Monograph, manifesting on the other hand, that Macau was not the place under close governance of both parts in its previous history. The Chinese scholar Zhao (1992) interpreted this phenomenon from an ideological perspective:

這大概由於澳門一地的興盛和發展, 時在西方人入居之後, 而中國人對它反覺陌生的緣故。然而澳門畢竟是中國土地的一部份, 它的興衰去留是不會不被國人關注的。 (Zhao, 1992, p. 1)

This [the existence of few records] is perhaps because the prosperity and development of this territory [Macau] were accentuated by the Western presence, to make it unknown to the Chinese themselves. However, Macau is part of the territory of China, and its historical vicissitudes have not gone unnoticed by the Chinese (translation by the authors).

他們編著澳門記略一書, 就是在這種禦侮思想和對西方事物的新鮮感驅使下進行的。 (Zhao, 1992, p. 5).

They edited the monograph driven by the vexations of foreigners, coupled with curiosity. (translation by the authors)

As Macau is an integral part of the land of China, the Mandarin authors have every legitimate right to this ideological claim. This ideological claim, as Han (2017) argued, reveals a strong "self-image" of Macau in the looking glass of Mandarins, although the Western presence makes the territory "unknown". The usage of "foreigners" in the Monograph further confirms this conviction. In fact, these "vexations of foreigners," or rather, these "defensive considerations of invasion", do not come from nowhere. The monarchy of China, in its territorial conquest, used to have these ideological considerations, either in the defensive battle of its reign or in the fight against ethnic minorities. The Mandarins are trained and disciplined to conform to these considerations. As for "curiosity" as an imperialistic attitude toward foreigners, we can witness this idea in the content of the Monograph of Macau in its second part, exclusively dedicated to the topic—"foreigners"—in which the authors describe the customs, traditions, religion, sociolinguistic practices of the daily lives of the foreign inhabitants of Macau.

It is also worth noting the status of Macau at the time when the two authors were writing the Monograph of Macau. It was a prefecture in China. The administrative hierarchy is subordinate to the central power of the Qing Monarchy. This image of "inferiority" of Macau is conveyed in the preface of the Monograph of Macau through the statements of one of the Mandarin authors—Zhang Rulin, referred to in 澳門紀畧校注 [Monograph of Macau with Annotations] (Zhao, 1992).

九州之大, 騶衍有言, 而亥步或未之歷。[......] 澳門, 南交一黑子耳, 一枝遠寄, 等於蒙鳩。 (Yin & Zhang, 2010, pp. 3–3)

As a Chinese philosopher Zou Yan says, the Nine Great Departments (China) are so large that not even the good walker Hai can go from one end to the other. [...] Macau is nothing more than a tiny black dot in the south of China, a lost lotus branch, almost like a Wren. (translation by the authors)

In addition to this ideological claim in Monograph, we can also trace the sociolinguistic practices of Macau in the book:

西洋語雖侏離, 然居中國久, 華人與之習, 多有能言其言者, 故可以華語釋之, 不必懷鉛握槧, 如楊子遠訪計吏之勤也。定州薛俊著《日本寄語》, 謂西北曰譯, 東南曰寄, 然《傳》云重九譯, 統九爲言, 雖東南亦稱譯, 從古邦畿在西北, 不言寄, 尊王畿也。 (Yin & Zhang, 2010, p.246)

The Xiyang language is strange. Since those from Xiyang have been in China for a long time, some of the Chinese who have learned their language have already mastered it. Therefore, it is perfectly possible to reproduce their words in Chinese. It would be unnecessary to carry study material around, as Yangzi has done so diligently with the accounting staff. Xue Jun, from Dingzhou, in his work, Transcribed Japanese Terms, states that in the Northwest translation is called Yi and in the Southwest Ji. The "Chronicle" says Chongjiuyi. In the Southeast, it is also known as Yi. In the old days, the state capitals were in the northwest, so the term Ji is not used as a sign of respect for imperial capital. (translation by the authors)

After that, the Monograph provides a Vocabulary in five categories, namely, (1) Heaven and Earth; (2) persons and objects; (3) clothes and food; (4) utensils, numbers, and measures; and (5) words of common use. From the Portuguese translation of the book (by Luís Gonzaga Gomes in 1979), we can obtain the code switching (translanguaging) among Portuguese, Cantonese, and broken Portuguese.

Vocabulary from Ou-Mun Kei-Leok, Monografia de Macau (Gomes, 1979. p. 268)

In conclusion, both the Regimento of Lingua da Cidade, e dos Jurubaças Menores e Escrivaens, issued in 1627, and the Monograph of Macau in 1751, as institutional documents about the language policy and translation policy of Macau, manifested their ideological claim toward the territory. From the historical background and the narration in the Monograph of Macau, we can see that multilingual practices in Macau prevailed. However, we need to point out that the colonialization event in 1846 by Portuguese Governor Ferreira do Amaral was a turning point in many aspects of Macau society, including its far-reaching impact on the language policy and translation policy of Macau. This change eventually occurred in 1846.

The third multilingual stage (1846–1915) and milestones

As a consequence of colonialization, the Portuguese government needed to negotiate with Chinese authorities in diplomatic affairs as well as in the daily business of local residents. A series of initiatives were taken by the Portuguese Administration. In 1865, the Portuguese administration created the Division of Chinese Language Interpreters (Corpo de Língua Cynica) (July 1865) through a Decree published in the Government of Macau Bulletin on 9 October 1865. In this Decree, it is considered that the city of Macau needed an organization dealing with Chinese affairs to carry out the functions assigned to it, considering the relations with the authorities of the Chinese empire and the necessities of its population. Its foundation coincided with the School of Combined Learning, or the Tongwen Guan (Chinese: 同文館), a government school for teaching Western languages (and later scientific subjects), founded in Beijing, China, in 1862 during the late Qing dynasty, right after the conclusion of the Second Opium War, as part of the Self-Strengthening Movement.

In 1885, the Department of Chinese Affairs (Repartição do Expediente Sínico) (1885–1945) was created through the Decree of 2 November 1885, since the Division of Chinese Language Interpreters could not handle the increased amount of translation and interpreting tasks. Its creation was considered an important milestone of institutionalized translation. Furthermore, in 1905, the Chinese School (Escola Sínica, 1905/1915–1976) was created by the Royal Decree of 22 July 1905, attached to the Department of Chinese Affairs, and began to function in 1915. Since then, the institutionalized training of Portuguese-Chinese bilinguals was formed in this special sociolinguistic context of Macau.

One thing that we need to discern is that these initiatives of the Portuguese administration were not to promote multilingual practices but to facilitate its diplomatic affairs and regulation of the Chinese population. This kind of initiative, to some scholars, was characterized by laissez-faire and indifferent attitudes toward language policy (Li & Tong, 2020) and went through the whole Portuguese administration until the proximities of the handover of Macau to China. However, we could not negate its significance and historical contribution to the translation policies of Macau. By the same token, the ideological attitudes of the Portuguese Administration have clearly transmitted in a top-down manner: (1) this initiative reinforced the status of Portuguese as the only official language of Macau, while Chinese was the translated language; (2) translation/interpreting has since been institutionalized and has exerted a far-reaching impact on future translation policy elaborations.

In conclusion, this multilingual stage of Macau is characterized by strategic institutional practices, with occasional translation whenever necessary. By applying Meylaerts’s theory, we would say this is an intermediate strategy: a linguistic and translational regime characterized by institutional monolingualism combined with occasional and temporary translation into the other minority languages. It is important to note here that the term "minority" used in the above strategy does not refer to the number of speakers but rather to the “power relations” involved in that linguistic group (Meylaerts, 2013, p. 548). The Portuguese-speaking population in Macau was less than 10% of the total population in the nineteenth century (Zheng et al. 1994, pp. 64—65). Therefore, instead of being a less spoken language in Macau, Portuguese was the institutionalized language, and in power relations, it was overwhelmingly dominant in the administrative, legislative, and judicial spheres of Macau (Cheng & Liu, 2019); this situation did not change until after 1999.

The fourth multilingual stage (1915–1975) and milestones

This stage can be considered the most systematic and organized training of Chinese-Portuguese translators in history. In addition to the institutionalized translation, civic media publications promoted many multilingual practices. A group of Macanese elites became key figures in society in advocating multilingual practices.

In 1915, the Chinese School began to function. As its name indicates, the school taught Chinese and Chinese classics and recruited Portuguese-mother-tongued middle school Macanese graduates. The school had two levels of courses, namely, the second-level translation course (5-year program from 1915 to 1946 and a 4-year program from 1946 to 1976) and the first-level translation course (2-year program from 1915 to 1976). After passing the second-level translation program, one could take the first-level translation program. Both programs offer oral and written Chinese teaching. Among them, the oral training of the second-level translation program referred to Cantonese, while the oral training of the first-level translation program was the Beijing dialect. Although both programs were of foreign language teaching model, by learning Chinese and Chinese classics (teaching Chinese as a foreign language), they had begun the preparation for interpreting teaching—oral training and began to distinguish language combinations—Cantonese or Beijing dialect, in oral training. In the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, Macau's society, politics, and economy went through a period of turmoil, and the operation of the Chinese School was greatly affected. For almost 30 years or so, there was a short "blank". This instability ended in 1976 when the Portuguese government went through a reorganization, and the Chinese School was renamed Technical School.

Nonetheless, the early glorious Chinese School successfully trained a group of prestigious Macanese elites and high-end interpreters and translators, which not only promoted the passion, enthusiasm, and study of traditional Chinese cultures but also established the translators' social status and prestige. Historically, the Chinese School had trained a group of prestigious and influential Macanese, diplomats, and translators for the Portuguese government. They had also become social elites in spreading the Chinese language and culture. During the preparation and operation of the Chinese School, relevant persons in charge included Pedro Nolasco da Silva (1885–1892), famous Macanese sinologist; Eduardo Marques (1892–1898), sinology interpreter; Carlos D'assunção (1898–1911), author of books for sinology; José Vicente Jorge (1911–1920), deputy consul and translator of the Portuguese Consulate in Shanghai, translator and secretary of the Portuguese Embassy in Beijing; Joaquim Faustro das Chagas (1920–1928), translator of the Portuguese consulate in Shanghai; Pedro Nolasco da Silva Jr. (1928–1931), sinology interpreter; António Maria da Silva (1931–1945), translator, etc. (Aresta, 2001, p.1538).

Even in the period of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, when Macau's society, politics, and economy went through turmoil, multilingual practices were still prevailing under the perseverance of the elite of Macau. The publication of articles in periodicals in Macau in those decades was largely concentrated in the daily newspaper Notícias de Macau, the bilingual monthly magazine Renascimento (1943–1945, Portuguese/English), and the trilingual monthly magazine Mosaico (1950–1957, Portuguese/Chinese/English), chaired by Portuguese and Macanese elites, aiming to energize the cultural panorama of Macau and effectively enhance the knowledge of China and Macau. In fact, the short “blank” of institutionalized translation was somehow filled by the multilingual practices in periodicals.

Cover page of Mosaico (CCM, 1950)

In conclusion, this multilingual stage of Macau featured the group of Macanese elites, who, as beneficiaries of the institutionalized translation policies, were dynamic advocators of multilingual practices. The beliefs behind this advocation reside not only in booming the linguistic and cultural lives of Macau—the place where they were born and raised—but also for the proper identity consolidation considering their ethnic, anthropological, literary, historical, and sociocultural backgrounds (Amaro, 1988; Cabral & Nelson, 1993; Si Tou, 1997; Piteira, 1999; Jin & Wu, 2002; Li, 2007, 2010; Rangel, 2007; Noronha & Ian, 2011; Gaspar, 2015; Han, 2017). By applying Meylaerts’s theory, we would say that Portuguese governance continued to be an intermediate strategy: a linguistic and translational territoriality regime characterized by institutional monolingualism combined with occasional and temporary translation into the other [minority] languages. However, the elites’ multilingual practices in this period took the role of translation management and created a bottom-up pattern.

The fifth multilingual stage (1976–1998) and milestones

The year 1976 was considered a turning point when the Organic Statute of Macau by the Portuguese Administration was approved and implemented. As a consequence, the Chinese School was renamed Technical School, and its teaching pedagogy was adjusted in relation to translation directionality. The later Sino-Portuguese Joint Declaration, signed in 1987, established the process and conditions of the transfer of the territory from Portuguese rule to the People's Republic of China, in preparation for the handover of Macau in 1999.

The Organic Statute of Macau was a Portuguese organic law that provided for the government in Macau. Approved on 17 February 1976, the Portuguese legislation reclassified Macau as a "Chinese territory under Portuguese administration". The organic statute was successively amended by Law No. 53/79 of 14 September 1979, Law No. 13/90 of 10 May 1990, and Law No. 23-A/96 of 29 July 1996. On December 20, 1999, the organic statute ceased to have an effect following the implementation of the Macau Basic Law, as the territory became a special administrative region of the People's Republic of China.

According to Decree-Law No. 4747/76/M, of 30 de October of 1976, the Chinese School passed to be named Technical School. In terms of enrollment and admission, the Technical School followed the tradition of the Chinese School, and the teaching target was still Portuguese-mother-tongued Macanese. However, in terms of teaching plans, new teaching content was added in response to its development. In addition to the original teaching of Chinese and Chinese classics, the subject "Chinese-Portuguese interpretation and translation skills" was officially included. Since then, another milestone in translation teaching in Macau has been construed: interpretation and translation skills were introduced formally in the curriculum.

Ten years later, in 1986, directive No. 186/86/M (Portaria No. 186/86/M) passed the teaching regulations of the Technical School of the Bureau of Chinese Affairs (Direcção dos Serviços de Assuntos Chineses). This time, significant changes had taken place in the enrolling and teaching model: in addition to the original Portuguese-mother-tongued Macanese, the students from the middle schools of the Chinese or English education system became potential candidates, and the training would focus on the Chinese (Cantonese)-mother-tongued students. Subjects such as Portuguese history, geography, and law, among other Portuguese subjects, have been added to the curriculum. This change is of milestone significance, which means that the translation teaching in Macau has begun a two-direction training model, from Portuguese to Chinese and vice versa. Meanwhile, the basic translation program for students in both directions was changed to three years (originally four years). After graduation, the students could choose to take an intensive translation program for one year (originally two years) to intensively study translation theory and practice. The overall duration of the programs has also been reduced from the original six years to four years (Li, 2016; Paiva, 2004). Such changes were closer to the higher education system and laid the foundation for its posterior integration into the Higher School of Languages and Translation of Macau Polytechnic Institute in 1992.¹

Meanwhile, the Sino-Portuguese Joint Declaration was signed on 26 March 1987, which established the process and conditions of the transfer of the territory from the Portuguese administration to the People's Republic of China. It prepared the way for the handover of Macau in 1999 and advanced the "three essential issues": the localization of Macau's civil service, the legalization of Chinese as an official language, and the localization of law, among which the legalization of Chinese as an official language has raised local great passion for Putonghua. The Chinese were first given legal status in 1989 by Decree Law No. 11/89/M of the Macau government, but it was not until 1991 that the "legalization of Chinese" was completed with the signing of Decree Law No. 455/99 by the President of the Portuguese Republic, Mário Soares. This legal document established the official status of the Chinese in Macau as that of the Portuguese (Leong, 2013, p. 108). On December 13, 1999, one week before the handover, the Governor of Macau promulgated Decree Law No. 101/99/M, reaffirming that both Chinese and Portuguese are official languages of Macau and both "have the same dignity", with a mechanism that "ensures the coexistence and use of these two languages on a fully equal footing" (Xu, 2012, p. 28). The same document also specifies the application of the two official languages in the legislative, administrative and judicial spheres, which officially marks the transition of Macau from institutional monolingualism to bilingualism.

The promulgation of Decree-Law No. 455/99 has led to changes in both translation and language policy in Macau. On the one hand, Chinese has officially entered the administrative sphere, competing directly with Portuguese, and will gradually take the dominant position. On the other hand, given the gradual establishment of a bilingual system at the legislative level, some areas that were neglected by the government before the handover began to show interest in Portuguese, such as higher education (Teixeira-e-Silva & Lima-Hernandes, 2014, pp. 69—70). Portuguese will no longer be simply "the language of the administration, the ruling class, the civil service, and the law" (Grosso, 2007, p. 18) but will also play an increasingly important role in other areas in Macau.

In conclusion, we can see that the change in sociopolitical contexts has a fundamental impact on translation policy and local multilingual practices. The adaptation of translation directionality as well as the passion for Putonghua has raised the status of Chinese (Cantonese and Putonghua). This top-down policy, both judicially and administratively, began to favor the establishment of an institutional bilingual system during this period. It should be noted that instead of the official status of Chinese already established in Macau, Portuguese still dominated the Macau government. The official status of Chinese does not mean that it has become the official language of Macau (Lam, 2007, p. 43), and it was until the handover in 1999 that Chinese became the official language in Macau. Macau's bilingual policy had been through a process of transition from a "law in the books" to a "law in action" (Casabona, 2012, p. 231).

Conclusion

By reviewing the language policy and translation policy of Macau before handover, we can see its multilingualism has shown different characteristics in different stages: it experienced the initial loose and weak management and then passed to be regulated by institutions; it can be used as ideological claims by Chinese or Portuguese administrations and can be utilized as a tool for identity consolidation by Macanese; it can be shaped by changing socio-cultural and political contexts and has transformative power in shaping the socio-cultural and political contexts. The history of translation teaching in Macau is also a very precious record, as it has a different developing route of translation teaching from that of the Chinese mainland, as evidenced by Lily Lim:

The early stage of interpreting studies in China emerged by the end of the 1970s without much support from (interpreting) theories or empirical research. Interpreting training at that time was more based on the experience of interpreters/instructors, which tends to be anecdotal and less systematic (2020, p. 144).

In this sense, if we include Macau's unique translation teaching into the whole picture of translation studies in China, the earliest period of translation training in China could be dated back to the seventeenth century due to the contribution of Macau.

On the other hand, Macau, as the meeting point of oriental and western cultures and the place of multilingual practices over centuries, has its own systematic translation management, featured by various regulations, institutionalized translation practices and historical translation records. Understanding translation policy in the case of Macau not only helps to fill the gap in studies on language policy and translation policy but also contributes greatly to depicting a fuller picture of the language policy and translation policy of China. From this perspective, this article contributes to the development of a modified translation policy theory with the employment of a specified classification of translation management and the adaptation of a detailed categorization of translation in Macau. It is expected that through this study of the translation policy of Macau, especially with the mentioning of the historical milestones of each stage, we can take historical experiences as a new perspective to evaluate the present translation policy and look into the in-depth exploration of the translation policy of other regions of the GBA, such as Hong Kong SAR, to better cope with its burgeoning development of language planning.