Cisneros’ Code-Mixed Narrative and its Implications for Translation

Abstract

The pragmatic consequences of code-switching in the field of literary translation, especially in the case of Chicano novels that are written in English but code-switches to Spanish for pragmatic, narrative and stylistic purposes have barely been studied so far. The aim of this paper is to analyze how code-switching has been dealt with in the translation into Spanish of these novels that, although written in English, use Spanish to convey specific pragmatic functions and certain stylistic effects. Our corpus will consist of three novels by Sandra Cisneros (The House on Mango Street, Woman Hollering Creek and Caramelo) and their translations into Spanish.   Preliminary results point out that most code-switching values, which in the source texts are signaled by the alternation between two different languages, sometimes are lost in translation. We propose here two techniques to translate these pragmatic values: explicitation and compensation. One of the most important consequences of the study is the need for a through pragmalinguistic analysis of the source text, especially when the main linguistic feature of the text is the intentional shifting of languages for strategic reasons.