Part of understanding who these Spanish-language self-translators are and what contexts informed their upbringing and self-translation practices is appreciating when they were born. Preliminary self-translator generations are thus proposed below, according to decade of birth (see Table 2). As indicated, writers in this group were born no sooner than 1933 (Manuel Betanzos Santos) and no later than 1979 (Yazmet Madariaga Sánchez), with over a third (36%, or 9) of them born in the 1940s. Indeed, more corpus writers were born in that decade than in any of the others represented, with 1940s figures more than doubling each of the other totals. The forties mark a particularly steep increase from the previous decade (up from just two); and, although numbers dip back down (to four) in the 1950s, they remain steady during the 50s, 60s and 70s (Table 4). As for Appleton, Espinoza and Pastén, whose birth years I have not yet been able to confirm (see Table 3), we can be almost certain that they were born no later than in the 1950s, 1970s and 1940s, respectively.

Table 2
Summary of Self-Translators by Decade of Birth

Table 3
Self-Translators Born in the 1930s and 1940s or Whose Birth Year Has Not Been Confirmed

* In 1982, Appleton was in the process of completing a Ph.D. (Nómez, 1982, p. 290). If we assume she was at least 25 years old at that time, she would not have been born later than in the 1950s. ** Espinoza moved from Chile to Canada in 1995, and one of the universities she attended before moving was the University of Chile (Espinoza, 2001, inside flap). Since it is therefore unlikely that she was under 20 years old when she migrated, she would have been born in the mid-1970s or earlier. *** Chilean-born Pastén stopped teaching at the University of Chile at Antofagasta in 1973 and went on to direct the Immigrant Learning Centre in Winnipeg between 1978 and at least 1982 (Nómez, 1982, p. 246). If we assume he was least 25 when his teaching in Chile ended, then Pastén would have been born no later than in the 1940s.

Table 4
Self-Translators Who Were Born in the 1950s-1970s

The apparent absence of corpus self-translators born in or after 1980 compels us to wonder why such a gap might exist and/or what that gap might suggest about the factors that have motivated Spanish-language self-translation in Canada. After all, it is certainly plausible for a 36-year-old-that is, the age of the oldest among these absentee writers-to have translated their own writing. What’s more, there is evidence of non-corpus writers who have published Spanish-language self-translations in Canada since 2016. A case in point is Sofía Monzón Rodríguez (2020a, 2020b), who was born in Toledo (Spain) in 1993 and thus far has two published self-translation text-sets to her name, both involving Spanish and both published in 2020 in Canada, after her 2018 move to the country (S. Monzón Rodríguez, personal communication, June 11, 2021). It is useful to consider this gap by imagining alternative ways of understanding self-translator generations. That is, in addition to defining them per the writer’s year or decade of birth, we could conceive of them in relation to when writers first self-translated. For instance, what self-translator generation does a writer belong to in terms of:

1. when in their career as a (published) writer they first self-translated?

2. how old they were when they began

3. self-translating? or

4. when, in relation to their arrival in Canada (in the case of international migrants), they started to self-translate?

In short, Spanish-language self-translators in Canada who were born in the 1980s and afterwards may, like Monzón Rodríguez, only be beginning to produce self-translations in more recent years.

When it comes to birthplace, this corpus of self-translators collectively represents 9 countries, as summarized in Table 5.

Table 5
Summary of Self-Translators by Country of Birth

Given the language that defines this corpus, it is surprising that Spanish has official status in only four of the countries listed: Bolivia, Chile, Mexico, Spain. Equally surprising is that three of those four countries are represented by only one (Bolivia, Spain) or two (Mexico) writers. The uniqueness of the only Spanish-born writer-Manuel Betanzos Santos, who moved to Canada in 1959 (Hazelton, 2007, p. 5)-can be usefully understood in relation to the fact that, among those who migrated from Spain to Canada in the 1950s and 1960s and went on to be published writers, many had “already [been] successful authors in Spain before they emigrated” (Hazelton, 2007, p. 5). In other words, there seems to be no evidence, in works published between 1971 and 2016 at least, that pre-migration writerly status encouraged or foreshadowed Spanish-language self-translation among this group of migrants; while they may have published self-translations before that period, I have not come across any such examples thus far. For context, it may be useful to consider examples of writers who seem to have had potential to self-translate, such as madrileño Jesús López Pacheco (1930-1997) and Galician-born Antón (a.k.a. Antonio) Risco (1926-1998), both of whom went on to work as professors in Canadian universities (Western Ontario and Laval, respectively). López Pacheco continued to write extensively in Spanish after his 1967 arrival in London (Ontario) and translated other writers’ works from English into Spanish; Risco, for his part, continued to produce literary works-mostly science fiction/fantasy-in Spanish and, predominantly, Galician after relocating to Quebec City (Hazelton, 2007, p. 5, p. 234, pp. 264-265). Neither writer seems to have translated their own work, however. The fact that Betanzos Santos was Galician (Hazelton, 2007, p. 5) may not be insignificant either, since it is in Galicia (as well as Catalonia and the Basque Country), albeit predominantly during the post-Franco era, that Spain-based literary self-translation has been especially prevalent.

As compared to the limited figures associated with Spain, Mexico, and Bolivia, a whopping 15 of the 25 corpus self-translators hail from Chile, the fourth country in which Spanish has official status. The abundance of Chilean-born self-translators in Canada is indeed striking, with Chilean-Canadian writers clearly constituting an important cohort of Spanish-language self-translators in Canada. Their high concentration is not entirely surprising, however, given the 1973 putsch push factor that led to massive Chilean emigration (Wright & Oñate, 2012, p. 149) and saw some 7,000 emigrants arriving in Canada around that time (Dirks, 1995, p. 61). What is perhaps more remarkable is the corpus’s non-representation of certain countries that resemble Chile in terms of Spanish being their official language and large numbers of their people having moved to Canada during the period under study. This is the case, namely, for Argentina and Colombia, although the former is notably the country where Margarita Feliciano grew up, having moved to Argentina from Italy as an eight-year-old.

When it comes to the five countries in which Spanish does not have official status, the United States stands out because of the dominant position the language nonetheless occupies there. With Latinos/Hispanics making up roughly 17 % of the national population (Washbourne 2019, p. 86), the country is home to upwards of 40 million Spanish speakers. This figure is of course dwarfed by the number of people who speak English; nevertheless, in addition to outnumbering those who speak any other single language there, it sees the U.S. rivalling Argentina, Colombia, and Spain as the country with the second largest (after Mexico) number of Spanish speakers worldwide. What is noteworthy, then, is that, whereas hispanohablantes in the U.S. more than double the total population of Chile, only one (versus Chile’s 15) of the corpus self-translators was born in the nation to Canada’s immediate south: draft resister Hugh Hazelton.

One might therefore expect that, for this writer, Spanish would have been inherited through a kind of genealogical legacy, at-home acculturation, or other form of immersion within the immediate community. Instead, Hazelton is among those who learned the language through his own initiative. His interest in and familiarity with Spanish, including its cultures, began to develop when he was an early reader-very curious about “archeology, including the Mayas, Olmecs, Incas, and pre-Incans and other civilizations in Central America and South America, as well as [about] Latin American history”-and it deepened thanks to secondary and postsecondary study, as well as extensive travel throughout South America as an adult (H. Hazelton, personal communication, July 7, 2021; permission to cite this material was granted by H. Hazelton (personal communication, July 13, 2021)). Since those earlier linguistic and cultural encounters, he has become a writer and translator whose works and personal and professional activities routinely involve Spanish. He has also become the foremost scholar in Hispanic-Canadian literature, all of this clarifying why he is sometimes referred to by his friends and colleagues as an honorary Latin American (H. Hazelton, personal communication, July 14, 2021).

As the preceding observations demonstrate, five of the nine birth countries identified would have been in an especially good position to encourage their writers’ potential self-translation practices to incorporate Spanish. In terms of self-translators, these countries actually account for 20 (or 80%) of the corpus writers, leaving five who were born in countries where Spanish is neither an official language nor a dominant one.

Three of these self-translators were born outside of Canada: Patricia Appleton in Scotland, Roger Moore in Wales, and Margarita Feliciano in Italy. As already mentioned, Feliciano actually grew up in Argentina; consequently, “Spanish became her mother tongue” (Hazelton, 2007, p. 52), which helps to explain the presence of that language in her self-translation practice. As for Moore and Appleton, each had spent time in Spain prior to relocating to Canada and went on to study Spanish at the graduate level at the University of Toronto, with Moore going on to have a career as a Spanish professor at St. Thomas University in New Brunswick (Nómez, 1982, p. 290; “Roger Moore,” n.d.). I have not been able to confirm additional details about Appleton. The two self-translators who were born in Canada, and more specifically Montreal, are Lisa Carducci and Claude Hamelin. Hamelin principally worked as a prolific molecular biologist (Villedieu, 1986, p. 8), teaching at the Institut Armand-Frappier (Université du Québec) from the late 1970s until 2000 (“Claude Hamelin, poète”). I do not know how he came to know Spanish. As for Carducci, she is a writer and a language (Italian, French), theater and history teacher, who has primarily resided in China since 1990 (L’Île, 2015). Although her Canadian and Chinese milieus were less informed by Spanish than Hazelton’s U.S. context was, she is similar to Hazelton in that her interest in Spanish seems to have been more intrinsically motivated, learning the language through reading, through Hispanophone acquaintanceships, and through trips to Mexico and Spain, rather than through formal study (L. Carducci, personal communication, July 14, 2021).

These five cases, along with Hazelton’s, help to clarify how “Spanish-language” is used in this discussion to refer to the presence, within a writer’s self-translatorly œuvre, of self-translation texts that are written in Spanish, rather than to refer to some essential trait (e.g., birthright, citizenship) of the writing subject. Tables 6,7 and 8 identify the countries of birth for each of the corpus self-translators and, when known, the year in which the writers arrived in Canada.

Table 6
Self-Translators Who Were Born in Bolivia, Italy, Scotland, Spain, and Wales

Table 7
Self-Translators Who Were Born in Canada, Mexico, and the United States

Table 8
Self-Translators Who Were Born in Chile

The information above allows us to further describe the corpus in terms of “migrant” versus “sedentary” self-translators (Grutman, 2015, p. 10) (Table 9), with the vast majority of the writers identified according to the former classification.

Table 9
Sedentary vs. Migrant Self-Translators

What we can also appreciate is the extent to which Spanish-language self-translation in Canada seems to be an activity that is primarily practiced by first-generation migrants-that is, those who immigrated to Canada as adults. As detailed in Tables 10 and 11, only four self-translators might be considered “generation-1.5 migrants” (Rumbaut, 2004), meaning that they immigrated at a relatively young age and were therefore brought up in Canada.

Table 10
Generation-1.5 Migrants

* Neatly fitting M. A. Peñafiel (especially) and T. Peñafiel into one of these migrant categories is perhaps less obvious than for the other cases listed here.

Table 11
Migrant Self-Translators

Second-generation Canadian migrants-the misnomer used to refer to people who were born (and typically raised) in Canada but whose parents were born (and typically raised) elsewhere-does not seem to apply to any of the sedentary self-translators in the corpus. In this regard, the only unknown quantity, and therefore potential candidate, would be Claude Hamelin. As for the other sedentary self-translator, Lisa Carducci, it was her (paternal) grandparents who migrated from Italy to Canada (L. Carducci, personal communication, July 14, 2021), which would make her a third-generation migrant (another misnomer) (Table 12).

Table 12
Third-Generation “Migrants”

According to findings for regions studied thus far, contemporary Spanish-language self-translation in other parts of the world overwhelmingly features sedentary self-translators. The preceding survey helps us to understand that writers in Canada who translate their own works using Spanish are, by contrast, overwhelmingly migrant self-translators, and primarily first-generation migrants. Furthermore, it characterizes these migrant roots as predominantly Latin American and especially Chilean, rather than Spa(i)nish, while also clarifying the range of alternative birthplaces, most of which are unexpected.

While self-translation text-sets most often consist of two self-translation texts, this is certainly not always the case, and it is meaningful to our understanding of self-translators’ “fingerprints” to consider such divergences. Per Table 15, five corpus writers, who together represent four of the six frequency categories, have at least one text-set that involves more than two self-translation texts. Even within a writer’s self-translatorly œuvre, we see a clear preference for bitextuality, as seen with Martha Bátiz Zuk (5 out of 6 text-sets), Luciano P. Díaz (109 out of 113), and Carmen Rodríguez (38 of 41). Yet Hazelton distributes his energies evenly across biand tritextual text-sets (14 vs. 13), and all 144 of Hamelin’s self-translation text-sets exist tritextually. What makes Rodríguez’s case particularly interesting is that one of her text-sets contains as many as four texts.

Table 15
Self-Translators With More Than Two Texts per Text-Set

While the corpus analyzed in this article has been linguistically designed around the Spanish language, the texts contained within the corpus are of course not restricted to that language alone, since that would contradict the interlingual nature of the translations being discussed. Indeed, what we observe is that texts are also written in English, French, and standard Italian. Table 16 describes the distribution of all 1366 of these self-translation texts across the four languages, highlighting the collective tendency to write-whether “authoring” or “(self-)translating”-in Spanish and, to a slightly lesser extent, English.

Table 16
Representation of Self-Translation Texts by Language

The fact that a writer has incorporated Spanish into their self-translation practice does not, however, imply that all or even most of their self-translations involve that language. It is therefore meaningful to consider how many corpus text-sets actually involve Spanish, per Table 17. Note that, since “all” of the text-sets in the œuvre of a one-time self-translator necessarily involve Spanish, the table does not list those writers.

Table 17
Use of Spanish Language Among “Rare” to “Prolific” Self-Translators

As we can see, levels of engagement with Spanish are very high indeed. This helps to validate the use of “Spanish-language” to characterize this corpus of self-translations and, in turn, its self-translators. At the same time, it is noteworthy that these writers do not necessarily incorporate Spanish into their self-translation text-sets. Three writers have text-sets that do not involve Spanish. For two of the self-translators, non-involvement applies to quite a small number of their works: 3 out of 27 text-sets, in Hugh Hazelton’s case; 1 out of 5, in Alejandro Saravia’s. The third writer, Lisa Carducci, is an outlier in this regard, having written only a minimal number of self-translation texts in Spanish: 2 out of 51 text-sets (as mentioned earlier).

How does this level of self-translator engagement compare with levels for the other three languages? Table 18 summarizes the proportions. These findings, along with those observed in Table 16 with respect to texts, underscore the variations that evidently characterize language use within self-translators’ own œuvres.

Table 18
Number of Self-Translators Working With Each Language

The vast majority of these writers have bilingual self-translation repertoires, which consist of Spanish and English in 13 of the cases and, Spanish and French in 8 others (per Figure 1 below). The four remaining self-translators have either trilingual repertoires (Hamelin, Hazelton, Saravia), involving Spanish and both of Canada’s official languages, or repertoires that are quadrilingual and additionally contain Italian (Figure 2). Carducci is the only corpus writer who has incorporated this language (cf. Table 18).

Figure 1
Self-Translators Who Have Bilingual Repertoires

Figure 2
Self-Translators Who Have Trilingual or Quadrilingual Repertoires

How are languages combined within these writers’ self-translation text-sets? Figures 3 and 4 provide a summary of these combinations, as they relate not only to the number of textsets they reflect but also to the number of writers they represent.

Figure 3
Self-Translation Text-Sets per Language Combination

Figure 4
Self-Translators per Language Combination

A number of observations can be made in response to these results, the first of which pertains to how Spanish pairs up with French and English. There are strikingly different levels of productivity associated with English-Spanish and French-Spanish: While the same number of people combine the two languages in each case (13), there are four times as many English-Spanish text-sets (312 vs. 78).

Despite having four languages in her self-translatorly repertoire, Carducci has combined Italian with French only. This accounts for most (42) of her 51 text-sets, with the other 9 made up of French-Spanish (2) and English-French (7) text-sets. The consistent French-language base of Carducci’s practice corresponds logically to her Francophone Montreal upbringing. Her comparably strong inclination to self-translate with Italian, however, would be best appreciated in relation to how she came to know the language. While she had Italian-born grandparents, and although her father spoke the Ripabottoni dialect, standard Italian was not spoken in the home in which she grew up, since neither of her parents knew the language; instead, Carducci learned Italian independently, in much the same way she learned Spanish (L. Carducci, personal communication, July 14, 2021).

Figure 4 alerts us to the fact that, of the three writers who have English-French-Spanish self-translatorly repertoires, only two have text-sets that also function trilingually. Hamelin’s self-translatorly behavior is consistent throughout his practice, with 144 text-sets containing self-translation texts in each language. By contrast, Hazelton has paid more balanced attention to both bilingual and trilingual practices, with 14 of the former (3 x English-French; 1 x French-Spanish; 10 x English-Spanish) and 13 of the latter. Saravia is the outlier in this respect, having consistently worked bilingually within the three languages. He has one English-Spanish text-set, one English-French text-set, and three text-sets that involve French and Spanish. Thus, when self-translating, writers do not necessarily explore all of the potential combinations within their respective linguistic repertoires (cf. Carducci, Saravia), just as they do not explore all of their active combinations equally (cf. Carducci, Hazelton, Saravia).

On the other hand, we notice that such exploration sometimes goes beyond combinatorial expectations. Hence, certain cases involve more than one self-translation text in a given language: English-English-Spanish and English-English-Spanish-Spanish. The first of these combinations describes one text-set each in Martha Bátiz Zuk’s and Carmen Rodríguez’s œuvres, and four textsets in Luciano P. Díaz’s work.

Bátiz Zuk translated her Spanish-language short story “Día de plaza” into English, first as “Square Day”-which she describes as a more literal translation-and then as “Plaza Requiem,” which according to her, reflects major modifications (M. Bátiz Zuk, personal communication, Sept. 22, 2020). In other words, more than just the title changes in the English versions of this text-set. In Díaz’s case, three of his poetry collections-of which two are in English, both entitled Nomads, and a third is in Spanish (Nómadas)-collectively contain four self-translation text-sets in which certain differences exist between the two English versions. In “The Sailor” ≈ “The sailor” ≈ “El marinero,” for instance, a line in one of the English texts reads “remember those who pollute the waters,” whereas the same line in the other version is worded as “remember the little men who pollute the waters with their pretensions.” Similarly, there are a variety of differences between Rodríguez’s short stories “Hands” and “Hand-Made Times,” the Spanish version of which is entitled “Manos.”

I have also made comparisons between the two Spanish versions and between the two English versions of Rodríguez’s short story text-set “Los barquitos en la bahía” ≈ “Tiny Boats in the Bay” // “Juegos y jugarretas” // “In the Company of Words.” In both cases, a handful of syntactical and lexical differences were identified: for example, “Del piso 42” versus “Del piso 32,” and “disappeared the 19th of September” versus “disappeared the 11th of September.”

Rather than republications of existing material, the second English and/or Spanish texts in each of the referenced text-sets constitute new versions of the work. A distinction can therefore be observed between type-language and token-language (Wetzel 2005, p. 1028, referencing Charles Sanders Peirce), whereby Bátiz Zuk’s text-set, for example, involves two type-languages (English, Spanish) but three token-languages (English, English, Spanish). Accounting for token-languages in this sense allows for the density of the practice of self-translation to be appreciated.