Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the implications of translation for language change, with hybridity understood from the systemic perspective as a phase in a language’s development. It discusses the extent to which the kinds of hybridities. The book presents result in the breakdown of English into mutually unintelligible varieties. It argues that the film evokes for the Anglophone viewer not Mexico, where code-switching between English and Spanish is rare and carries a very different charge, so much as the borderland territories north of the 3, 200-kilometre-long frontier with the United States. The book describes a translation that was deliberately undertaken to undermine the hegemony of English and which seems to have been very successful in reproducing the ‘wilfully disjunctive syntax’ and ‘alliterative quality’ of the source text.