Karen Van Dyck:
Migration, Translingualism, Translation, with a response by Dimitris Christopoulos, International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH)
Increasingly literature asks how to translate the foreign accents and multilingual idioms of the migrant. Two contemporary Greek novels–one about Greeks in the United States, the other about Greek Albanians in Greece–address this question by developing translingual practices that are themselves translational. Using hybrid creoles that blend languages through transliteration and homophony, these novels imagine translation solutions that challenge the hegemony of standardized national languages. The American case foregrounds the visual impenetrability of the new alphabet, while the Balkan case treats sound as a permeable means of encompassing ethnic differences. How might attention to translational poetics in the source text enable translators to be more experimental by exposing the instability and ideological import of the translating language? How might comparative studies of translingualism in literature and literary translation offer new categories for understanding migration?
