Mouse vs. Ratón. A Study of Hybridity in the Form of Language Mixing in English-to-Spanish Translations of Wikipedia Articles

The idea that all texts are in principle linguistically and culturally hybrid has been defended by some scholars throughout the past decades (Schäffner and Adab 2001b; Snell-Hornby 2001). Translation theorists have focused on translated texts as carriers of hybridity, displaying a mixture of features from both the source text (ST) and the target text (TT). Taking this idea as point of departure, the present study tackles the issue of hybridity in Wikipedia translation. Through a series of qualitative interviews with six experienced English-to-Spanish Wikipedia translators and the analysis of six translated articles, this project is aimed to see 1) if Wikipedia translators from Spain have a more conservative attitude to language use and translation than their Latin American counterparts, and 2) if the latter actually use more Anglicisms in their translations when compared to the Spaniards. The results revealed that the interviewees’ attitudes towards language, especially regarding the use of Anglicisms vs. pure Spanish lexical items, were to a certain extent echoed by the findings from the analysis of the six translated articles, with the translations performed by the Spaniards being slightly more conservative than those carried out by the Latin American users, whose texts accounted for nearly 63% of the Anglicisms found in the investigation. The study also addresses the concept of third space (Bhabha 1994, Snell-Hornby 2001) in relation to Wikipedia, showing that the online encyclopedia does indeed function as a collaborative space where meaning and forms are constantly in flux and negotiated among its users.