National and supranational Spanish: Complexities of production and migration in literary translation

This study broadly considers textual and extra-textual factors involved in producing and disseminating Spanish translations, dimensions that may be linguistic, socio-linguistic, cognitive, economic, cultural, or legal. Sociolect and regionalect are considered in the translation traffic into Spanish, particularly in their relations to aesthetic verisimilitude or market acceptability.

The phenomenon of what has been called textual mobility is traced. According to De Clercq et al. (2006), textual mobility may include translation policy, translator-publisher negotiations, printing industry conditions, copyright considerations, and other power matrices, including censorship and patronage. Censorship’s historical effects on translation policy are borne out in light of translational contraband and distribution.

Variants of Spanish are shown to be involved in dynamics of writing from the margins, perceptions of language correctness, including the hybridity and its implications for identity, and the attendant issues of power. The special problem of interregional insularity is tied to migrational limitations. Finally, the Spanish-speaking world’s hierarchies, asymmetries, and inter- or intraliterary commerce practices past and present are broadly examined (including multinational publishing houses and editorial coproductions), alongside the advent of Spanish-language publishing in the United States and what this might augur for literarily localized or globalized Spanish translations.