When a book comes out—if it’s successful—a couple of things can happen. That book can make it on lists, like the New York Times Best-Sellers, or Goodreads Listopia. It can win awards like the Booker, the Hugo, or the Pulitzer. Or it can be translated into other languages—reprinted for audiences all over the world. There are some famous examples of this. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, was originally published in Portuguese. Tolstoy’s Anna Kerinina, was of course, authored in Russian.

But this opens up a whole new room for debate, and not just in regard to authorship. This act of translation—it's never perfect. It can’t be. That’s just not how language works. Sometimes, aspects of the original text don't work in a new language, sometimes things just fall flat. Other times, a translator might take creative liberties, embellish things or make minor changes out of preference. In all of this, there is change. There is a disconnect between pieces. A translation is never a true, meticulous, word by word reprint of the original.

Jessica Shafer is a Junior here at the UNCW, and she has been ruminating on this quandary. Her paper, “The Languages of Caramelo and Puro Cuento,” examines Sandra Cisneros' bilingual epic and its Spanish-language translation. In it, she ponders: What is lost when a novel is translated? What is potentially gained? How is a text even further complicated by the inclusion of multilingual hybrids, like Spanglish or Ingspañol? And, what effect does this code-switching have in Cisnero’s writing?