Official Translations of Names of New Places

Mr Dennis Tan Lip Fong asked the Minister for National Development whether official translations are made of new place names.

The Minister for National Development (Mr Lawrence Wong): Mr Speaker, to name a new street or building, the developing agency or private developer makes an application to the Street and Building Names Board (SBNB).

For street names, applications are made in English. Chinese translations of the approved English street names are then proposed by the Ministry of Communications and Information, in consultation with the National Translation Committee’s Chinese Resource Panel as necessary. The approved English and translated names of new streets are then made available on the URA website. For building and estate names, no official translations are made.

Mr Dennis Tan Lip Fong (Non-Constituency Member): I thank the Minister for his reply. I have two supplementary questions. One, would the Minister also advise what is the situation regarding translation to Malay and Tamil? Two, would it be possible if the Government can consider setting up a portal whereby members of the public can access this portal to actually have the official names of any street in Chinese, Malay and Tamil?

Mr Lawrence Wong: Mr Speaker, Sir, I think we have to go back to the history to understand why the translations are made specifically in Chinese. In the past, we had street names in English and Malay, but the various Chinese dialect groups had their own dialect versions of the names. There was confusion and it created inconvenience. That was why in 1968, the then-Ministry of Culture decided to set up a committee to standardise the Chinese names and this committee went about doing so, and that practice of providing official translations of street names in Chinese has continued till today.

We do not do so for Malay and Tamil. We have not done so in the past, and we still do not do so, because the issue of different translations did not arise in these languages. For that matter, there are quite a number of streets where the names are transliterated from Malay and Tamil. For example, Jalan Bukit Merah which is in Malay, and Neythal Road which is in Tamil. So, the need for these different translations did not arise in the past and there was never a need to do an official translation in Malay and Tamil. But there was a necessity to do so in Mandarin for the reasons I have explained earlier.

And as I have stated in my reply, the names in English and Mandarin are all available on the URA website.