Translational creativity in the linguistic landscape of Shantou

A city’s linguistic landscape (LL) reflects and projects the multiple historical, social, and cultural influences it has received. As a historic treaty port and a current Special Economic Zone in China, Shantou occupies unique position in China’s contact with colonialism and globalization. The city holds a simultaneously submissive and resistant attitude towards English hegemony, which is reflected in the creative manipulation in LL translation in the public space. Drawing on a corpus of over 100 photographic images of commercial signs collected between 2017 and 2020, this chapter analyses the creative use of English in the LL of Shantou, noting that that global and local forces work together to shape the city’s LL. While Shantou embraces globalization by using English to implicate its orientation towards modernity and cosmopolitanism, the city also preserves its locality by reinterpreting English with modern values. The meshing of different linguistic, cultural codes, and the coordination of textual, visual, and aural modes creates semiotic assemblages by means of which the city responds to globalization and negotiates locality in its cultural context. The translational creativity in Shantou’s LL can be interpreted as a means of resistance through which the city enacts agency and articulates identity in a postcolonial context.