Pulitzer-prize winning author Junot Díaz stages culture clashes in his work by dramatizing the linguistic tension between English and Spanish. This stra tegy, which he calls "linguistic simultaneity" (code-switching), is central in his fiction because it expresses his Latino identity, and it is artistically and politically significant. Translators who wish to recreate his texts for another reader ship are forced to rethink what translation is and thus to consider new paradigms, since code-switching defies the traditional conception of trans lation as the transposition from one closed linguistic system to another. Translations into one of the languages that make up the fictional universe of the source text (in this case, Spanish) are especially challenging. Focusing on the extent to which translators transpose the linguistic simultaneity of Díaz's source texts, this paper explores the possible reader responses to strate gies used to maintain or downplay linguistic tension in the target texts. A comparison of two translations into Spanish of Diaz's short stories "The Sun, The Moon, The Stars" and "Otravida, Otravez" from This is How You Lose Her (2012) will illustrate how linguistic simultaneity is recreated.

Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) by Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa, is a paradigmatic text when it comes to the representation of “mestiza” identities expressed through several tongues. The particular use of language in this book poses an interesting challenge in terms of translation. This article addresses the coexistence of languages for Spanish readers in three translations of the second chapter of Borderlands, entitled “Movimientos de rebeldía y las culturas que traicionan”. I focus on a comparative textual analysis of a collective translation of the chapter by Maria Serrano Gimenez, Rocio Macho Ronco, Hugo Romero Fernández Sancho and Álvaro Salcedo Rufo (2004), and the translations by Norma Elia Cantú (2015) and Carmen Valle (2016). The different approaches to the translation of multilingualism in these versions of Anzaldúa’s text are examined.

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