Crossing la(s) frontera(s): The Multilingualism and Translation of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands / La Frontera

Abstract

This dissertation examines the manner in which the translations of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands / La Frontera, negotiate its multilingual practice across languages, given its central focus on the Spanish-English binary. This study examines translations into two varieties of Spanish (Mexican and Castilian), as well as French, Italian, and German. It focuses on particular lexical and terminological choices, the practice of code-switching, and self-translation. Moreover, the study is based on a comprehensive quantitative and qualitative analysis, which is structured around three core characteristics: typography, explicitation and implicitation, and the proportions of languages used. The results demonstrate that the translations tend to prioritise the linguistic tensions inherent in the source text, as they are reinterpreted within new cultural contexts.