Inspired by the insight that translations are hardly equivalent in meaning
(Snell-Hornby 1988), these papers put forward the view that Hong Kong bilinguals codeswitch
to English because the English expression has no Cantonese word or phrase which
is equivalent in meaning (also called the “availability” motivation: Li 2001; Li and Tse
2002), even though some Cantonese translationwith similarmeaningmay be available.