At all stages of translation and editing, we are guided by the desire to respect the interviewee and their story, both in their words and their intent.

Hard at Work has been documenting life in Singapore since 2014, when students from the National University of Singapore began conducting interviews as part of a class taught by Gerard Sasges. In 2016, photographer and visual anthropologist Ng Shi Wen joined the project and Hard at Work was born. While the explicit topic of our investigations is work, we use the topic as a way into the larger processes and problems that shape Singapore. Thus, the project not only opens a unique window on Singapore society today, but also documents important changes in that society over time, from the impact of the Covid pandemic to the changes of the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution (“Industry 4.0”). In this way, we hope to document the nation’s past, its present, and even its emerging future.

Students are free to choose the people they interviewed. Sometimes students mobilize networks of friends or family. Other times, students interview complete strangers. Our project is guided by three commitments. One is to what professional scholars call “informed consent.” Before we began an interview, we told potential participants about the nature of the project, let them know the name and contact information of both myself and the student interviewer, and made it clear that their interviews might be published. Everyone was given the choice to participate in the project or not, and if they chose to participate, signed a consent form. The consent forms have only been seen by three people – the interviewer, the interviewee, and myself – and are kept in a secure place. With a few exceptions when the person is obviously identifiable and where they gave us explicit permission to proceed on that basis, all interviews are anonymous, and details that might make people identifiable have been changed or removed. 

The second commitment was to interview people attentively, responsibly, and empathetically. Over the course of each semester, we develop our interviewing skills in a range of ways. We begin by thinking about our own position and about the power dynamics involved in interviewing. We pay attention to issues of class, race, age, and gender and how they might shape the interview process. We learn to follow up and to encourage people to elaborate and expand on things that might otherwise go unspoken. We practice how to listen to people, paying attention to silences, pauses, intonation, and movement as much as the words that were being said. Most generally, we try to treat each interview as a conversation between equals, shaped by our questions and our methods but ultimately determined by the stories people wanted to tell and the ways they wanted to tell them. 

Our third commitment is to respect the stories we were told and the people who told them. One part of this involved translation. Most of the interviews are conducted in some form of Singapore English (“Singlish”), but some are conducted in part or in whole in other languages. When this was the case, the task of translating is up to the interviewer. Not only are they the ones with the necessary linguistic competences, but also they have the first-hand experience of the interview itself. This combination, we feel, gives the best chance of success at a process that is as much about context, idiom, and even emotion as about the words themselves. If the speaker is Singaporean or a long-term resident, then we translated into Singlish; if they aren’t, then the translation is in Singapore Standard English. To take one example, an interview of a Singaporean cleaner, conducted in Chinese, would be rendered in Singlish while an interview of a Chinese national doing the same job would be in Standard English. No translation is perfect. Yet it still has to be done. As the translator and critic George Steiner put it, “Without translation, we would be living in provinces bordering on silence.”

The other part of this commitment involves editing. Few of us would want to read an unedited transcript of a conversation. Even the most coherent, composed person will backtrack, digress, repeat themselves, and punctuate their conversation with innumerable “umms” and “errrs.” So as much as we want to provide an authentic account of every conversation we have, we also have to take account of the need to make interviews engaging for readers. The first stage of editing is carried out by the interviewer themselves. The most obvious change is to turn a conversation into a first-person monologue. Taking out the interviewer’s questions and contributions, we feel, is the best way to foreground the speaker and their story. Interviewers might also remove parts they feel are repetitive or unhelpful, or in some cases reorder passages within the interview. The second stage is carried out by the editors. For the most part this involves editing the interviews for length. In a few cases, we make further changes to the ordering of passages within an interview in order to create a more coherent flow from beginning to end. If major changes seem warranted, we make them in consultation with the interviewer. At all stages of translation and editing, we are guided by the desire to respect the interviewee and their story, both in their words and their intent.