Fighting Inferiority: Negotiating Identity and Otherness through (Self-) Translation

In an increasingly multilingual and multicultural world, more and more people live in-between cultures and languages. Migrant literature is a means through which people can express their feelings of loss and gain, exile and belonging and, more specifically, people can find their own true identity. Some immigrant writers may decide to write in a different language from their mother tongue for several different reasons. Eva Hoffman, for example, is a case of self-translation where the writer, who is a native Polish, decides to write in English, her adopted language. This shift from one language to another and from a culture to another serves the purpose of building a new identity, an identity which strives to fight her inferior status of immigrant and makes her more suitable for the new environment in which she is living. The aim of this work is to explore the deep connections between language, culture and individual identity. Firstly, the connection between translation and migration will be investigated to show how these two phenomena are linked through the practice of self-translation. Secondly, this paper will attempt to explore how language(s) and culture(s) shape identities through a text analysis of Eva Hoffman’s novel Lost in Translation.