Literature emerging from borderland, transnational or diaspora contexts doesn’t always fit the mould of the dominant national culture where the author resides. Usually this literature is published in the language of the larger society, but sometimes authors prefer to use the language variety in which they write as one of many tools to resist assimilation and highlight their independent or hybrid identity; such is the case with Matilda Koén-Sarano's Judeo-Spanish folktales and Susana Chávez-Silverman’s Spanglish crónicas. When this is the case, translation from these varieties must be done in a way that preserves the resistance to assimilation in a different linguistic context. In this thesis I begin by defining Judeo-Spanish and Spanglish as language varieties, consider who uses them, who writes in them, and the political or personal motivations of the authors. I then problematize the broad issue of translating texts written in nonstandard language varieties. I consider power in translation generally and into English more specifically. I nuance the binary between rejecting translation completely, and embracing it wholeheartedly as essential. In the final two chapters I turn my attention to specific challenges that presented themselves in translations from Judeo-Spanish and Spanglish and explain how these challenges informed my approaches and strategies. No single translation approach or strategy emerges as a monolithic solution to all problems. Nevertheless, my original contribution to knowledge lies in the nuanced discussion and creative application of varying degrees of ethnolects (or literary dialects), writing based in phonetics, and intralinguistic translation that are explained and that are evidenced in the original translations found in the appendices.

This dissertation focuses on dominant contemporary depictions of women in order to investigate the related processes of producing and policing physical attractiveness and privilege in mainstream cultural productions. I examine how certain US Latina, Colombian, and Dominican female portrayals fit definite paradigms of ideal beauty and contribute to patterns of power within magazines, films and television, music, and literary novels. I explore the ways in which the majority of dominant representations in all three countries favor specific beauty ideals linked with an Anglo or Northern European archetype, thus limiting the acceptable model and excluding a great part of the racially mixed female population which fails to match this criterion. By studying the relationship between body image and messages that inspire anxiety for those women who fall outside of ideal beauty patterns, my analysis bridges sociological and anthropological studies within literary theories and visual culture and contributes to new perspectives on Latinidad and Tropicalism by including a trans-nationalistic approach. While much work has been done on the connection between the body and identity within the United States, scholarship within this area has been more limited within Hispanic literature and Latin American popular culture in terms of the role of power structures. While one perception of beauty is that it is merely physical, in reality racial classification and the recognition of “legitimate” beauty have tangible impacts on social matters such as access to employment, marriageability, perceptions of education, civilization, decency, and purity.

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