Esther Allen
Baruch College, City University of New York, USA
The perils of polyglossia
The selection of the language in which an utterance is made is the first and most significant semantic component of that utterance, the primordial basis of its meaning. It may also seem to be the one component of a text’s meaning that a translator must betray. A translation, however, embodies a theory of the text it represents, of the scope of the translator’s work, and of the relationships between the languages the translation moves among. The translator who chooses to produce a multilingual text enacts, reinforces, and comments on those relationships. But polyglossia’s playing fields are not even: what one language means within another may not be what the other language means within the first.
Keywords: polyglossia, multilingualism in translation, translation as theory, intellectual property rights, Spanish and English linguistic relations
Biography
Esther Allen is an Associate Professor at Baruch College at the City University of New York. She is both a noted practitioner, as a translator of Latin American literature, and a theorist of literary translation, having published and edited well-known works on translation. She has twice been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and was named a Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres by the French government. She is currently a fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography, working on a book about José Martí. Professor Allen’s most recent translation is Antonio Di Benedetto’s Zama (New York Review Books Classics, 2014).