Translating Home in the Global South

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."

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.