Article: If English is Spanish then Spanish is ...: literary challenges of representing bilingual speech production and reception in Esmeralda Santiago's America's Dream.

Much has been written of late about the difficulties of translation, issues of faithfulness and readability that arise when a text originally produced in one language is remade in another, but here the questions are of a different order. Much of Santiago's novel (1) takes place precisely on the borders between two languages, as America, the Spanish-speaking protagonist, struggles to understand the English that is a prerequisite to work in San Juan and later in Westchester County. In writing the dialogue for these scenes, the novelist takes on the familiar task of transposing the oral to the written, but with the additional challenges of representing the production and ...

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