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 queer theory, the book's three sections critically reflect on different dimensions of the intersection of translation and migration in a diverse range of literary genres and media. The first part looks at self-translation, collaboration, and co-creation as modes of expression born out of displacement and exile. The second section considers radical strategies of literary translation and the threats and opportunities they bring in situations of detention and border policing. The final part 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.

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

Marlene Hansen Esplin is 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 U.S. 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.