ABSTRACT
This study opened with a discussion of monolingualism versus multilingualism in the United States, traced the role of translation within feminist and theater groups in Canada, discussed the centrality of translation in new theoretical concepts such as cannibalism in Brazil, looked at new locations for translation theory in the fiction of Latin America, and concluded with the ideas of acculturation versus transculturation as developed by Caribbean scholars. With such new theoretical constructs entering the discourse of translation studies, issues of identity must be part of the discussion. Transcultural implies cultural change. I suggest that in the new global age, with increasingly faster electronic means of communication, new forms of transportation, and increased access to alternative media sites, the processes of hybridization will only increase. Michael Cronin’s Translation and Identity (2006) speaks directly toward this point. Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere, when proposing the cultural turn in translation, suggested that scholars look at both the poetics and the ideology of translation, which led to over a decade of strong investigations into issues of translation, power, and politics. Cronin suggests that the analysis of identity should now be the focal point of the field: “If previously ideology had been the principal way of structuring political communication, identity has now taken over” (2006:1). The previous chapter, on the Caribbean islands’ evolution, with different peoples and cultures continuously intersecting and crossing borders, provides an excellent arena for this study of translation and identity in the Americas. Rather than viewing such conflicts in political terms, conservative or progressive, my goal has been to recognize the positive aspects of such resilience and point to new openings for continuation and strategies for survival. Translation, whether in an overt or covert fashion, is ingrained in the very psyche of the individuals who live in the Americas. I suggest that the next turn in translation studies should be a social-psychological one, expanding a functional approach to include social effects and individual affecs.
