Foreignization and translanguaging : translating Silvina Ocampo for the US multilingual literary sphere.

Immigration and mass media have fostered the diversification of the United States literary sphere during the 21st century. This multilingual realm has a marked growth of Hispanic readers; however, the US publishing industry favors English-language works and sustains a unidirectional global flow of translations. Lawrence Venuti suggests that Anglo-American translators can foreignize texts to preserve the source language, author, and culture, ultimately preventing an “ethnocentric reduction” by English, a historically hegemonic language. Therefore, I, as a US-born female translator and heritage Spanish speaker, conserve the voice of fantastic Argentine writer Silvina Ocampo (1903-1993) by foreignizing twelve of her short stories and narrative poems from Cornelia frente al espejo (1988). Specific words are left in Spanish in my pieces to allow the target second-language, heritage, or bilingual Spanish readers the opportunity to partake in translanguaging, and the glossary incites active reading that can further cultural and linguistic fluency.