"Frontera sin fin" de Carlos Morton: spanglish y traducción

Carlos Morton, a third-generation Chicano born in Chicago, lived on the Mexican-American border for many years. In the play analyzed here, whose forceful title is Frontera sin fin, Morton features the plight of young mojados, the lawless life on the border and the tragedy afflicting Ciudad Juárez. In this paper we account for the bilingual strategies used by the author and popularly referred to as Spanglish. Spanglish (from span- (Spanish) + -glish (English), is the product of the encounter (and clash) between two worlds, two sensitivities and two languages: the Hispanic and the Anglo-Saxon one. It is a world of double cultural references and of intertwined cultures bearing the seed of something new. In the study, we also discuss some issues that emerged in the translation of the play into Italian. Besides posing the challenges typical of dramatic texts, Frontera sin fin requires specific strategies for the translation of the characters’ discursive behaviour (e.g. codeswitching and the use of low oral registers). This element is crucial, since linguistic variation in Frontera sin fin is motivated not only as a stylistic resource, but as a symbol of hybrid identity and rebellion against the assimilating culture. According to a functionalist perspective we examine how, thanks to the negotiating nature inherent in the translation act, we have tried to make the text accessible to an Italian-speaking audience without obliterating its Mexican-American in-betweenness.