On mid-Atlantic Spanish in literary translation

Abstract

This article applies the mid-Atlantic English approach described by Michael Henry Heim (2014) to the context of Spanish in literary translation. After describing Heim’s approach, it seeks to establish common points between this approach and a mid-Atlantic variant of Spanish. This is followed by a discussion of the background and attitudes towards neutral Spanish, and the potential advantages of a mid-Atlantic variant for the translation of dialectal language. Finally, it proposes a list of features from different Spanish variants to create potential geographically neutral variants of Spanish, in line with Heim’s features for his regional mid-Atlantic English.