Literal Translation as a Strategy of Deterritorialization and Special Case of Code-switching in Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek

Abstract

This article approaches the study of literal translation as a strategy of deterritorialization and as a special case of code-switching in Woman Hollering Creek, a collection of stories by the Chicana writer Sandra Cisneros. In order to explore this strategy of deterritorialization, we will examine a selection of idiomatic expressions which, placed at the lexicalsemantic and pragmatic levels of discourse, are perceived as literal translations from Spanish to English. Given the relationship between the deterritorialization of language, code-switching and literal translation in the construction of Cisneros’s discourse, we will present two complementary sociolinguistic models (Myers-Scotton, 1993a, 1993b) which might combine with the theory of enunciative heterogeneities (Authier, 1984, 1995) to account for the cases of literal translation found in this narrative