What are the implications of what Emily Apter has described as “linguistic nominalism, or what a language name really names when it refers to grammatical practices in linguistic territories” for translations between closely related languages (2006, 5)? To state the obvious, the phenomenon that Roman Jakobson calls “interlingual translation” is predicated on the existence of discrete and identifiable “languages” (1959). Yet, as the adage goes, “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy,” its frontiers more dependent on socio-political considerations than on linguistic ones, as no linguistically meaningful criterion exists to distinguish a dialect from a language, or to determine if a given dialect belongs to one language or another spoken over the border. If the borders between languages --like those between the nations that speak them-- are themselves ideological constructs, where does that leave translation, the art of carrying words across those borders?


Pairs of languages that “border” one another on a dialect continuum (Romance, Germanic, Slavic, Arabic, etc.) thus have the potential to problematize received ideas concerning interlingual translation. George Steiner has suggested that, when the translator works with “a source-text from a language and/or a cultural milieu proximate to his own,” cultural and linguistic familiarity becomes more of a hermeneutic hinderance than a help (1998, 380). Yet, in the last generation, comparative literature and translation studies have shown more interest in theorizing relations between vastly different languages and cultures than in units that are uncomfortably close to one another. Aamir Mufti’s work on the colonial division of Hindi and Urdu into two seemingly separate “national-linguistic traditions” is a notable exception (2018). Meanwhile, scholars such as Anthony Pym (2000), Robert Patrick Newcomb (2011), and Ori Preuss (2016) have turned their analytic gaze to Ibero-American Romance languages: Spanish and Catalan, Spanish and Portuguese, Portuguese and Galician, etc. What about other world regions? What are the stakes of translating between mutually intelligible languages and their respective cultures? After all, if readers can access works in another language directly, why bother to ferry texts over linguistic frontiers at all? Do these acts of translation reinforce notions of cultural sameness, or of difference? What are the socio-political stakes of translation between closely related or mutually intelligible languages?