Using the presidential theme of Multilingualism in the USA as a point of departure, this panel explores multilingualism and translation in the Spanish-speaking world. Multilingualism within the Global Hispanophone signals the past colonial routes and present migratory flows that complicate the social cohesion national literatures purport to consolidate. Multilingualism also connects racialized subjects in the Spanish-speaking world to others elsewhere, particularly in the United States where the Black Diaspora is a seminal and salient element of identity formation. Finally, multilingualism shows the hybrid nature of languages and cultures emergent from ongoing cultural contact, thus subverting the fixity of national languages, literatures, and cultures. The papers in this panel engage with issues of translating both languages and symbols in the Spanish-speaking world.

Remy Attig’s paper “Translatability at the Edges of Spanish: Challenges for Translating Spanglish and Portuñol Literature” considers the role that Spanglish and Portuñol play in the source texts and how those language varieties map onto different groups across the Anglo/Hispanic borders. He notes that Translation Studies has long focused on the translation of literature between national languages; much less research has examined so-called hybrid language varieties that blend elements of two or more languages. While it could be argued that this is because such language varieties have a very short history of publication, that is changing. Beginning in the 1980s US Spanglish and Uruguayan Portuñol began to emerge in publication. The use of these “mixed” languages from the cultural borders of the Global Hispanophone serves to conjure up in the mind of the reader very specific cultural contexts that are tied to notions of intersecting identities for US Latinx and Uruguayan border populations. Attig's paper thus theorizes how language hybridity impacts translatability for both English-speaking and Spanish-speaking readers.

Bringing race into the panel’s discussion of translation, Aaron Coleman investigates how AfroCuban poets’ (Nicolás Guillén, Plácido) original poems and their translations by Black USAmerican poets (Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson) cultivate an Afrodiasporic empathy that bears witness to the artistic strategies and lived experiences of Black peoples from two different countries, thus reimagining the literary and sociocultural potentialities of Blackness transnationally. In his paper, “Literary Translation as Afrodiasporic Witness: Translation Between AfroCuban and Black USAmericanPoets,” he asserts that the history and praxis of literary translation holds the potential to recontextualize the relationships between Afrodescendant writers in the Americas. Indeed, occasions of translational exchange between AfroCuban and Black USAmerican poets complicate traditional Comparative Literature and Translation Studies frameworks that consider nationality without attuning to the positionality of marginalized Afrodescendants within nation-states.

Delving into issues of a supposedly “neo-racism” in the European context in her talk “Translating the Hijab: Images of Neo-Racism and Belonging in Contemporary Spain," Caroline Colquhoun uses the fraught, polyvalent signification of the hijab as a point of departure to discuss ongoing debates related to secular and Islamic feminisms. Analyses of the graphic novel El nord (2009) and writings of Muslim feminists authors in Catalan and Spanish are theorized through Etienne Balibar’s work on European neo-racism, along with scholarship about multinational identities in Spain. Colquhoun considers how translation and mistranslation implicate peripheral nationalisms in both the promotion of social cohesion and the propagation of derogatory stereotypes, and she asks to what extent the polemics around the regulation of Muslim women’s garments may be veiled pretenses for institutionalized Islamophobia.

Finally, Víctor Sierra-Matute’s intervention “Linguistic Hegemony and Monumentalization: The Untranslatable Tongue of Cervantes” argues that just as English has been characterized as “the language of Shakespeare,” Spanish is commonly referred to as “the language of Cervantes” or “the tongue of Cervantes” [“la lengua de Cervantes.”]. This denomination is by no means apolitical; and there is, in fact, more ideology in it than at first sight we might imagine. Focusing on case studies from the Phillipines, Equatorial Guinea, Colombia, and the United States, his talk examines a series of “cervantine” statues and monuments built in the name of the so-called “untranslatability” of Spanish language and its canonical works.

Complicating the idea of a national literature through issues of translation and multilingualism, the papers in this session grapple with the question of nations, cultural production emergent from nations, national languages, and the racial implications of purportedly untranslatable figures and symbols.