“...and you can’t even speak properly”: AVT Strategies in Romeo and Juliet’s Singaporean Multilingual Adaptation Chicken Rice War (2000)

Chicken Rice War is not one of the most famous literature-to-film adaptations of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Filmed in Singapore and built around the feud between two South-eastern Asian families about who cooks the best chicken rice, one of Singapore’s national dishes, the movie has attracted the attention of a few critics for its multilingual uniqueness. The alternation among Cantonese, Malay, and Tamil on the one hand, and English(es) on the other, highlights the generation gap between older and younger characters. As if that were not enough, the continual shift from the Shakespearean English the young (meta-)actors try to reproduce when rehearsing Romeo and Juliet at school to SSE (Standard Singapore English) and Singlish exacerbates the linguistic complexity of the film. Chicken Rice War reproduces the actual plurilingual situation of Singapore, from both diachronic and synchronic standpoints. This article argues that audiovisual translation (hereafter AVT) strategies, i.e., English and Mandarin dual subtitles, and Singlish pop-up glosses that interrupt scenes – not an option for viewers, since neither of them can be hidden –, help both Singaporean and non-Singaporean viewers appreciate the complexity of the multilingual world the film reproduces, but also expose a complex ideological system where Shakespeare is demolished as a repository of Eurocentric values. Yet, the English language, which he made great, is omnipresent.