Restricted access to the most recent articles in subscription journals was reinstated on January 12, More informations. We look at how the translation by Cuban author Achy Obejas affects the narrative situation, and in particular the solidarity relation between narrator and narratee.
While the translation does to some degree neutralize this narrative voice, we argue that the Spanish version does not so much reduce as displace the solidarity effects embedded in the ST onto the relation between the implied author and reader of the TT. Surprisingly, the latter uses various paratextual insertions to construct an implied reader at some remove from the bilingual milieu in which the novel is set, and with which many Spanish-language readers in North America are highly familiar.
The translation of heterolingual literature has proven a particularly fruitful area of research for translation studies. In general, it is assumed that the translation process tends to reduce the interlingual tensions present in the ST Grutman ; Lewis ; Stratford As translation scholars have pointed out, the translation often not only homogenizes the original, but sometimes also inverts its values by familiarizing what was supposed to remain foreign the embedded language or languages and, vice versa, by defamiliarizing what was supposed to remain familiar the surface language.
As Meylaerts a; b has emphasized, making the identification of translation problems the core business of translation studies betrays the lingering presence of a predominantly equivalence-based conception of translation, which exaggerates the monolingualism of both source and target cultures. We agree that the question as to whether there is more or less heterolingualism in the TT must be complemented by the more encompassing one as to which functions are realized by heterolingualism, and, above all, whether these functions undergo significant shifts between ST and TT.
In what follows, we will analyze how heterolingualism Spanish-English code mixing or Spanglish functionally interacts with other phenomena, such as nerd talk or African-American English, and even with mechanisms of addressing the narratee.
