2021 Articles

Migration, Translingualism, Translation

Van Dyck, Karen

When literary translation is involved, sociological approaches tend to devalue the aesthetic form of translated texts while framing them as social and political documents. Van Dyck analyzes literary representations of migration, one of the most pressing developments of our time, demonstrating how migrants engage in innovation linguistic practices and considering how a translator might render those practices. Two contemporary Greek novels -- one about Greeks in the United States, the other about Greek Albanians in Greece -- create translingual spaces that are themselves translational as migrants use hybrid creoles that blend languages through transliteration and homophony, challenging the hegemony of standard dialects as well as monolingualism. Van Dyck questions existing English translations of these macaronic texts because they assume essentialist concepts of equivalence that dehistoricize the source texts. She instead proposes experimental translations that acknowledge their relative autonomy by introducing translingual patterning that is analogous but never identical to the migrants' linguistic innovations.

Keywords: Migration, Translingualism, Translation, Homophony, transliteration, Modern Greek literature, Thanasis Valtinos, Sotiris Dimitriou, Gringlish, Gralbanian