The Importance Of Hybridization In Literature

Translation has always played a key role in shaping cultures, societies, languages, and literatures throughout the history of mankind. On the other hand, in contrast to all its potentials, the discipline has been underestimated within academia and it had not been studied in any systematic way as a planning activity until the last century (Toury, 2002). Having been overshadowed by linguistics and comparative literature, the discipline of translation studies was conceived as a subordinate academic field. This is mainly because translation was merely seen as a code-switching activity and firmly stuck in the paradigms of fidelity and equivalence. This view of translation and translation studies was dominant until the emergence of the so-called “cultural turn” in the 1980s. With the shift

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Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin is one of the pioneers that referred to hybridity within the framework of linguistics, literature and stylistics. In his book The Dialogic Imagination first published in 1981, Bakhtin (2011) mentions two types of hybrid constructions: ‘unconscious’ and ‘conscious’ hybridization. Unconscious hybridization refers to the unintentional mixture of different languages that are prevalent within a single dialect, a single national language or a single group of social language. It is one of the most significant “modes in the historical life and evolution of all languages … [and] language and languages change historically primarily by means of hybridization” (Bakhtin, 2011, 358). The conscious hybridization, on the other hand, is an intentional hybrid that is primarily applied as “an artistic device” (Bakhtin, 2011, p. 358). Bakhtin (2011) defines these hybrid constructions