Translating Home in the Global South: Migration, Belonging, and Language Justice

by Isabel C. Gómez (Editor), Marlene Hansen Esplin (Editor)

Overview

This collection explores the relationships between acts of translation and the movement of peoples across linguistic, cultural, and physical borders, centering the voices of migrant writers and translators in literatures and language cultures of the Global South.

To offer a counterpoint to existing scholarship, this book examines translation practices as forms of both home-building and un-homing for communities in migration. Drawing on scholarship from translation studies as well as eco-criticism, decolonial thought, and gender studies, the book’s three parts critically reflect on different dimensions of the intersection of translation and migration in a diverse range of literary genres and media. Part I looks at self-translation, collaboration, and cocreation as modes of expression born out of displacement and exile. Part II considers radical strategies of literary translation and the threats and opportunities they bring in situations of detention and border policing. Part III looks ahead to the ways in which translation can act as a powerful means of fostering responsibility, solidarity, and community in building an inclusive, multilingual public sphere even in the face of climate crisis.

This dynamic volume will be of particular interest to students and scholars in translation studies, migration and mobility studies, postcolonial studies, and comparative literature.

The Introduction of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 International license 4.0 license."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781032456706
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	04/13/2025
Series:	Routledge Advances in Translation and Interpreting Studies
Pages:	236
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Isabel C. Gómez is an Associate Professor of Latin American and Iberian Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her book Cannibal Translation: Literary Reciprocity in Contemporary Latin America (2023) received a 2022 Helen Tarter First Book Subvention Prize from the ACLA. She served as the President of the ICLA Committee on Translation Studies 2020–2023. Currently, her research focuses on the intersection of climate activism and translingual poetics; she has been recipient of a National Humanities Center Residential Fellowship award for her next monograph Divest from English: Eco-Translation and Translingual Repair.

Marlene Hansen Esplin is an Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities in the Department of Comparative Arts and Letters at Brigham Young University. Her main research interests are translation studies and US and Latin American literatures. Recent projects include “Approaching Literary Self-Translation in the United States and Latin America” for The Routledge Handbook of Latin American Literary Translation, a review essay on “The ‘Outward Turn’ in Translation Studies” for Recherche littéraire / Literary Research, and an article examining intersections between translation and ethnography in English translations of Cabeza de Vaca’s Relación for Translation Review. She is the Vice President of the ICLA Committee on Translation Studies.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Home as a Translingual Practice

ISABEL C. GÓMEZ AND MARLENE HANSEN ESPLIN

PART I: Self-Translation, Collaboration, and Co-Creation in Migrant Writing

1 A Pandemic View of Translation: Novels of Catastrophe and Our Hemispheric Home

MARLENE HANSEN ESPLIN

2 Post-National Refugee Writing on Social Media: Translation as a Strategy of Survival

TATJANA SOLDAT-JAFFE

3 An Almost Invisible Scene: Collaboration and Co-Creation in the Task of Translating Ricardo Piglia

SERGIO WAISMAN

PART II: Detention, Denial of Home, and Border Policing

4 Dwelling in Indeterminacy: Interpreting the Migrant Poet in Detention

ALEXANDRA MARIA LOSSADA

5 Interpreting for Asylum-Seekers by a Former Refugee: Professionalism and Mental Health in Bekim Sejranović’s Transfiction

VIŠNJA JOVANOVIĆ AND FILIP JOVANOVIĆ

6 “A Big, Beautiful Wall”: Experimental Translation and Decolonial Practice in Mónica de la Torre’s Repetition Nineteen

JANET HENDRICKSON

PART III: Stateless Translation and Planetary Ecologies

7 Fluid Voices: Translating Language and Place in Novels of Migration

YAN WU

8 Specters of Home in Agha Shahid Ali’s Translations of Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Mahmoud Darwish

WAFA HAMID

9 A Puerto Rican Poetics of Disaster Relief and Cuir Eco-Translation

ISABEL C. GÓMEZ

Editorial Reviews

"This is a book that raises important issues for translation theory and practice . The various essays highlight ways in which texts have become destabilised through migration,  cultural displacement and statelessness, which challenges  the more usual translation relationship of source and target texts. The notion of belonging and unbelonging is threaded through the book, which invites us to think about whether what is needed is a new set of interlingual practices for our rapidly changing contemporary world."

Dr. Susan Bassnett, FRSL, FIL, Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature, Special Advisor in Translation Studies, School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Warwick

Professor of Comparative Literature, School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Glasgow

- Author of Translation Studies (Routledge, 4th edition 2014) and editor of Translation and World Literature (Routledge, 2019).

"Focused on the Global South, this innovative and thought-provoking volume on translation involves migrant writers, interpreters, and translators, connecting home to movement and transition. Each chapter in this welcome collection contributes compellingly to new understandings of how translation is a turning point in the making, unmaking, and remaking of home for people in transition among languages, spaces, and existences."

Siri Nergaard, author of Translation and Transmigration (Routledge 2021)

From the Publisher