Translating Chinese American Literature: Analysis of The Two Spanish Versions of Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club

Abstract

Amy Tan, a representative figure of Chinese American literature, achieved remarkable success with her first novel The Joy Luck Club both among literary critics and in the market. She succeeded in reawakening the Western interest on the Chinese American literature, which is an important branch of hybrid literatures. In this article, we will make a comparative and descriptive analysis of the two published Spanish versions of The Joy Luck Club in order to reflect on how to translate the multiculturalism, the third code,the linguistic and cultural hybridization that characterize those postcolonial works already constituting a cultural translation themselves and in order to explore whether domestication or foreignization is efficient enough when translating these postcolonial texts.