ABSTRACT
This study examines translation-as-resistance through three Malay reworkings of Western stories published in pre-independent Indonesia: De Dubbele Moord, The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu, and My Chinese Marriage. By accommodating foreign stories to local preferences, such publications provided opportunities for political, ideological, and financial gain. Chinese and Eurasian entrepreneurs, who occupied a liminal position in the colony’s racialised hierarchy, often spearheaded the dissemination of “international” stories. Through their deliberate linguistic strategies of omission and semantic broadening, these author-translators asserted agency over the texts, recreated them in ways that departed from the epistemes of the colonisers—most notably by stripping novels of their racist elements—and, hence, popularised them. The nature of early twentieth-century Malay was crucial for these translational politics to work. As a language that transgressed the boundaries of race and ethnicity, Malay provided the appropriate terms, either inherited or borrowed from Dutch or Chinese, to encode external concepts into localised modes of understanding, simultaneously granting the freedom to omit parts of the original they deemed gratuitous or redundant. As such, the translation of Western literary works into Malay, and the liberties taken while doing so, constituted a deliberate exercise to “talk back” to the colony’s hierarchies of knowledge.
