Hybridity in Londonstani’s Italian Translation

Book excerpt: This volume investigates how fictional literary varieties and characterising discourse in a literary text can be translated and reproduced in the target language and culture. For this purpose, selected examples from Gautam Malkani’s debut novel Londonstani (2006) and its Italian translation by Massimo Bocchiola (2007) are analysed and discussed, in terms of the solutions they offer for the study of linguistic variation as a translation issue, and in terms of the constraints involved in the translation of linguistic varieties. The contrastive analysis conducted on the novel and its Italian translation will serve to provide new insights into the several issues the translation of vernacular literature can raise. How can a translator linguistically recreate the hybrid identity of the characters as Londonstanis, and their performing of masculinity through ethnicity (by resorting to non-standard forms and linguistic repertoires other than the English language) in a new context (the Italian one), which only recently is experiencing the challenges of superdiversity? These are some of the questions this book answers. It will be of primary interest to a wide range of scholars in the fields of translation studies, sociolinguistics, and cross-cultural communication.