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Hybrid Englishes and the Challenges of and for Translation, edited by Karen Bennett and Rita Queiroz de Barros, approaches linguistic hybridity in the current context of a paradigm shift that we are witnessing in Translation Studies. Bennett and Queiroz de Barros’ volume provides concrete examples of a new trend in translation research that seeks to branch out to new linguistic contexts, on this occasion exploring translational issues with hybrid Englishes.

Until recently, linguistic hybridity was considered a sign of impurity. The traces of a foreign language, often viewed as inferior – as the Other’s tongue, were considered to be contaminating the superior status of one’s native language. However, as a consequence of large-scale migration, technological progression, and economic globalisation, this understanding of linguistic hybridity is now obsolete. Nowadays, the movement of peoples and communicative scenarios in cities and cyberspaces make daily use of all available languages and semiotic codes in a specific manner that combines them in unprecedented processes of hybridisation.

English and its many variations, both on and offline, are salient examples of such a paradigm shift, as well as of contemporary hybridity. The outdated conception of English as a bounded and uniform system, separate from other languages, has been replaced by other proposals. One such proposal arose from the arrival of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) at the turn of the century. Additionally, the recent success of a multi- or translingual paradigm highlights that English can no longer be considered a self-contained language. The attitude towards hybridity has therefore changed in all cultural spheres. The varieties of English that the official British form tried to silence in the public domain have recently started to demand recognition as standards.

Although this subject has gained a significant scholarly recognition, Bennett and Queiroz de Barros’ work addresses it from a rather original perspective. It analyses how the phenomenon of hybridity affects the theory and practice of translation, focusing on the variegated hybrid Englishes that are spoken, written and translated over the globe. The volume successfully problematises the question of how is it possible, or even conceivable, to translate from or into English when hybridity is present in the source text, especially taking into account that languages can no longer be considered bounded systems.

The volume seems to assume, and is to some extent based on, a multi- or translingual paradigm. However, we could perhaps detect a slight incoherence. The mentioned paradigm states that languages are not delimited and enclosed apparatuses; instead, they constitute a scattered, ceaseless net of linguistic confluences all over the world. Why, then, does the volume talk about hybridity if it is defined as the occasional convergence of tongues, therefore understood as bounded systems? Bennett, who admits in the introduction that the term is to some extent conservative, adduces two reasons for having opted for its use. First, due to its broadness and versatility among a wide range of disciplines, and second, because the present work was born from a special issue on translation and international English. This special issue received several papers that revolved around hybrid manifestations of English, rather than the lingua franca that Bennett and Queiroz de Barros had at first envisaged.

It is also important to mention a further controversial aspect of the volume, that is, the variety of discourses present in the volume. Each contributing author appears to write their chapter in a different style. Once again, Bennett offers a convincing explanation, that is, that this heterogeneity should not be considered a sign of irregularity or inconsistency, but a smart vindication of hybridity. Bennett and Queiroz de Barros use the term polyvocality to define the volume’s variety of discourses, which allows multiple “voices to proliferate from different disciplinary worlds” (p. 13). Together with a multi- or translingual paradigm, the polyvocality of the book aims to change “the very construction of knowledge in the Western world.”

The volume is made up of three well-structured sections. The first section studies the importance of translation for the constitution of contemporary identities, taking as examples the testimonies of journeyers, migrants and individuals who have grown up in cultural borderlands. In consonance with this, Fiona Doloughan’s opening chapter addresses the widely known writings of Xiaolu Guo, whose deeply Chinese-inflected English evolves, in terms of hybridity, as she experiences life on foreign soil and her identity is re-forged and broadened by new cultural environments. Doloughan’s reflection leads to the interesting idea that a migrant writer is constantly trying to “construct a version of self that is always already in translation” (p. 24).

The second chapter, by África Vidal, is dedicated to two Chicana authors, namely Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherrie Moraga, who were raised on the boundary between different cultures and languages. They speak and write a mestizo tongue which meshes English, Spanish, and even Nahuatl. Vidal explores both Chicana authors’ works in terms of their use of this idiosyncratic linguistic variety, and she does so with a certain purpose: to prove that hybridity is a reflex of cultural and racial asymmetries and therefore a weapon to dissolve them.

In the third chapter, Stefania Taviano studies diasporic Arab Hip Hop. Taviano argues that Arab and English coexist in this musical genre as a reciprocal translation in a multimodal code. Similar to the Chicana writers in the previous chapter, Taviano explores these hip-hop artists in terms of their display of a contentious attitude, inasmuch as they intend to denounce instances of cultural oppression all over the world, such as the plight of the Palestinians.

The first section closes with the volume’s fourth chapter, written by Sohomjit Ray. Ray looks back in time to the Opium Wars through Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies.[1] Ghosh’s novel is set on board a ship, in which his characters are travelling from Calcutta to Mauritius in an extremely multilingual bedlam. Ray reflects on the (un)translatability of this literary, purposeful infringement of anglonormativity, and at the same time considers Gosh’s work a manifestation of a multi- or translingual paradigm.

The second section faces one of the crucial questions of the volume, that is, what possible procedures or strategies might a translator employ in order to recreate the hybrid discourse of translingual authors in the target language? In the first instance, this question is explored by Isabel Oliveira Martins, Margarida Vale de Gato and Conceição Castel-Branco. They offer a discussion of the practical and technical difficulties tackled by the PEnPAL in Trans - Portuguese-English Platform for Anthologies of Literary Translation project,[2] which is an attempt to recreate the hybrid English of North Americans of Portuguese descent for a target audience in Portugal.

The next three chapters dwell on the ethical aspects of translating hybridity, in view of the power dynamics of which the translator needs to be aware in certain cultural circumstances. In line with this underlying aim, Elena Rodríguez Murphy, in chapter six, analyses Spanish translations of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s works. Adichie’s works are written in a translingual variety of English, naturally combined with Igbo, Nigerian Pidgin and influenced by other tongues and creoles. With little respect to hybridity, the Spanish translations, as Rodríguez Murphy notes, exoticize Adichie’s African-influenced words or expressions by using italics. The use of italics, Rodríguez Murphy argues, imposes a hierarchy when hybrid English is translated into standard Spanish: standard English acquires a normative status, whereas the African influenced elements are set apart as Other.

Contrary to the Spanish translations of Adichie’s works, Robert Dickson’s translation[3] of Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen,[4] as studied by Franck Miroux in chapter seven, is argued as having been intentionally undertaken in order to diminish the sovereignty of official English. Miroux’s study suggests that Dickson’s translation intentionally reproduces the disjunctive nature of the source text. Following Miroux’s analysis, Cristina Carrasco’s chapter delves into the Spanish translation[5] of Najat El Hachmi’s L’Últim Patriarca.[6] Similarly to Adichie’s works, the novel of this Moroccan-born Catalonian author, Carrasco affirms, was translated into a conventional, natural-looking Spanish, erasing all traces of hybridity. The last chapter of section two, by Remy Attig, examines the dubbing of the 2017 Disney/Pixar film Coco[7] into what he calls Spanglish. Attig examines examples of code-switching, lexical borrowing and varying grammatical structures that create a hybrid English that is unique to Chicano culture.

The third section adopts a systemic perspective to explore the extent to which translation can be considered a motor of language change, and hybridity, accordingly, a tumultuous stage in a tongue’s development. Rita Queiroz de Barros’ chapter reflects on the evolution of English over the centuries thanks to phenomena like translation, textual code-switching and vernacular bilingualism. In particular, Queiroz de Barros focuses on the example of Cervantes’ Don Quixote and the lexical change that is perceivable in every epoch’s translations of the masterwork.

The last chapter of the book, by Karen Bennett, is conceived as a conclusion of the whole volume. Based on the comparison between the use of the Islamic veil in European countries and the presence of foreign linguistic features in a language in the process of hybridisation, Bennett’s contribution addresses two key concepts. First, the limits of assimilation, which can be understood as a culture’s degree of tolerance and absorption of alien practices without losing its own identity, and second, transparency, which is the desire to always have the truth in sight, without strange elements obscuring the essence of one’s own culture. These two concepts, Bennett argues, could be applied to linguistic debates, which would lead to some critical questions, such as whether English preserves its identity despite hybridity? Does a language by the name of English even exist? In an attempt to find an answer to these inquiries, Bennett offers a list of six varieties of hybridity: postcolonial, diasporic, traveller or language learner’s, translational, ad hoc, and institutional. Although it is somehow bewildering that the reader has to wait until the last chapter for such a relevant classification to be revealed, it serves the purpose of a conclusion, since it sums up all of the issues raised in the previous chapters, and to which each variety of hybridity corresponds.

The volume ends with a decisive and challenging interrogative: “The end of English?” This calls for us to remember the dissolution of Vulgar Latin in the past: is English destined to follow the same route as Vulgar Latin? Will it eventually grow into multiple linguistic branches and even in new tongues? Bennett predicts, “as for the postcolonial and diasporic hybrids, […] these will draw steadily apart until they become mutually unintelligible, eventually producing a new generation of creoles” (p. 209). Whether this prognosis will be fulfilled or not remains uncertain for now, but there is no doubt that this volume brings forward reasons to believe in such a future scenario.