A two-way bond between translation and migration has appeared in the most recent texts in the social sciences and humanities: this connection between the two is exemplified by the mobility metaphor, which considers both practices as journeys across cultural, linguistic and geographical borders. Among the different ways this mobility metaphor can be studied, two particular areas of investigation are of interest for this research: firstly, migrant writing, a literary genre shaped from the increasing migratory movements worldwide; the second area of interest is literary translation, the activity that shapes the way these narratives are disseminated beyond the linguistic borders they were produced in. My investigation into the role of literary translation in the construction and circulation of a migrant discourse starts with the claim that writing and translation in itinerant contexts are driven by, and participate in, the idea of the journey: an interlingual and intercultural flow regulated by social/economic/artistic constraints, a movement in which the migrant experience is ‘translated’ in writing and then ‘migrated’ across languages and spaces. The present analysis focuses on the representative case study of migrant narratives by Canadian writers of Italian descent: their shared reflections on the themes of nostalgia and the mythical search for roots, together with a set of specific linguistic devices – hybridity, juxtaposition of languages, idiolects and registers – create a distinctive literary migrant discourse, that of the return to the land of origin. Guided primarily by the theoretical framework of Cultural Studies, the first part of this work seeks to illustrate how thematic and linguistic elements contribute to the construction of a homecoming discourse in original migrant narratives, and how this relates to the translation practice. Subsequently, the analysis moves to the examination of how these motives are reproduced in the translated texts, and what is/are the key rationale/s behind the translation of this type of works. Ultimately, my research takes a sociologically informed interest in the influence of translation and its agents in endorsing and/or manipulating this rationale in the receiving culture. In fact, this research aims to represent equally the human and cultural-linguistic aspects that affect these translational journeys, concentrating, firstly, on the actors (authors and literary translators) and the social and artistic environments that surround the production of both the source and target texts and, subsequently, on the texts themselves.

This thesis constitutes a first large-scale study of literary self-translators and self-translations in Canada, with self-translation understood as interlinguistic and intertextual transfer where the same legal person is responsible for writing the antecedent and subsequent texts. Three main questions guide this investigation: To what extent is Canada fertile ground for self-translation? What does it mean to self-translate in Canada? Why does self-translation in Canada matter? After situating Canada-based research within broader self-translation scholarship, I engage in a critical analysis of the definition and implications of self-translation and contextualize the theoretical, sociopolitical and methodological rationale for studying Canada and adopting a macroscopic approach to examining self-translations and their writers in this country. The thesis predominantly revolves around self-translation artefacts produced by three groups of writers who self-translated in Canada at least once between 1971 and 2016: 1) those self-translating exclusively between English and French; and those self-translating into and/or out of 2) Spanish; or 3) standard Italian. Exploring the theme of collaboration, I propose a new typology of collaborative self-translation, attempting to account for both process- and product-related considerations. In examining the theme of frequency, I identify self-translators and discuss their relative distribution vis-à-vis language, generation, country of birth and location within Canada; I also map out a conceptual framework for defining and counting self-translation products, proposing new ways of understanding and classifying writers in light of their self-translational productivity. In considering the theme of language, I analyze how writers and their self-translations can be characterized in relation to language variety, language combinations and language directionality. In this thesis, I argue that Canada is a significant hub of heterogeneous self-translational activity, and that large-scale, quantitative and product-oriented study constitutes a useful research approach that can generate rich findings and complement other forms of investigation. The thesis also contains an extensive appendix in which I identify Canadian self-translators and their self-translations.