Joanna's Singapore adventures

With Singapore's myriad of languages, dialects and accents plus much distinctive slang of its own, there is plenty of opportunity for things to get a bit lost in translation here!

Despite the fact that I am very obviously not Chinese, that doesn't seem to register with everyone. Often shop keepers will tell me prices in Mandarin. I just try to hand them what i think should be enough money and hope i get it right! Sometimes they have actually told me the price in English but their accents are too thick to work out what they are saying!

Many of my friends are comfortable in 2 or 3 languages so think nothing of dropping a few words of another one of their languages into a conversation otherwise in English. Sometimes this is because English doesn't have a suitable equivalent to the word or saying they'd like to use. Puzzlingly, sometimes even when English has an acceptable equivalent people will use another language anyway. My friends seem to particularly like the Mandarin word máfɑn (麻烦) which means troublesome or problematic. People are always gracious about translating but it can still be a bit awkward!

The other way things can get lost in translation is words that mean different things in Singaporean English to Australian English. One such word is mug/mugging. In Australia a mugging is a violent robbery. In Singapore mugging is to study obsessively, often by rote memorization. Needless to say it is a topic of conversation that comes up a lot at this time of semester. Of course when I stop to think about what they are saying, I know what they mean. However, my first response to hearing a statement like "So much mugging going on at the airport lah!" is to wonder when the airport because ridden with violent crime, not to ponder why on earth people would want to study there.