How to come out when ‘gay’ isn’t in your language? LGBT website provides translation resources for sexual minorities in Asia
- Asia.gay is the region’s first community-led platform providing news on gay health, lifestyle and other topics in a number of Asian languages, and in English
- Pages in Thai, Indonesian and English are now available, with Burmese, Malay and Arabic next up
When 13-year-old Tien wants to tell his mother he’s gay, he goes to the library. But he quickly realises there aren’t any appropriate words for homosexuality in Vietnamese. He eventually finds a mix of words in his native language and English to confide in his mother, who is not very conversant in English.
Tien is the protagonist of The Magic Fish, a graphic novel for young adults by Vietnamese-American writer Trung Le Nguyen, published in October last year. Inspired by Nguyen’s own story, it draws on his struggle to find the right words to express same-sex attraction and non-binary identities in the absence of such vocabulary in his mother tongue.
Unfortunately, this is a quandary faced by a large number of people in the LGBT community: access to relevant information, a great deal of which is online but only in English.
For millions across Asia, it is a monumental problem. The less widely spoken the language, the smaller the number of reliable sources of useful information.
On December 1 last year – World Aids Day – a Singapore-based company sought to address this lack with asia.gay, the region’s first community-led platform designed to provide the latest news on gay health, lifestyle and a host of other topics in a number of Asian languages, and in English.
