Translating signs, producing subjects

This paper moves between two streets: Liverpool Road in the Sydney suburb of Ashfield and Via Sarpi in the Italian city of Milan. What connects these streets is that both have become important sites for businesses in the Chinese diaspora. More specifically, both are streets on which the signs displayed by Chinese merchants have become controversial. White residents who have felt displaced or discomforted by the ethnic entrepreneurialism in these areas have imagined that requirements for bilingual signage would diminish their unease. In Ashfield, this has resulted in the introduction of a series of measures by local government to encourage Chinese shopkeepers to change their signage, including changes to regulations, information kits and annual awards. In Milan, there is high public pressure to introduce legislation making Chinese-Italian signs mandatory. What interests me is how such measures assume the process of translation to institute an equivalence between languages. Drawing on the work of Naoki Sakai (1997), who contests the proposition that discrete languages exist before the act of translation, I question the supposition that such measures serve to encourage interethnic dialogue, cultural hybridity and social harmony. Far from establishing a bridge between languages, translation divides them. With regards to Liverpool Road and Via Sarpi, this has tangible social effects, not least as concerns the production of subjectivity in relation to understandings of community and citizenship.