Suleri later extends this category of Pakistan as a feudal, patriarchal society where women are without voice, identity and agency to the entire third world. When US-based academic and author, Sara Suleri, writes a memoir of her girlhood in Pakistan, she writes about her grandmother, mother and the other women in her family, she categorises Pakistan as “a place where the concept of woman was not really part of the available vocabulary”, because the women were “too busy” negotiating “what it meant to be a sister or a child or a wife or a mother or a servant” (1). Additionally, given the focus on racism in the book, it could shed some light on the cultural gap regarding the type of literature that is being published and hopefully make people more aware of multiculturalism in Spain. This paper could benefit other translators by helping to provide solutions to the translation of names, neologisms and races. The overall result is a faithful translation that appeals to my target audience. The aim of these strategies focused on maintaining fidelity to the author by delivering an accurate representation of the world she created and her style as a writer. I also analysed in detail the problems encountered in the translation of names and neologisms, while describing the translation strategies used. Specifically, I analysed whether this novel would work in Spain, a country in which multiculturalism is viewed differently to in the United Kingdom.

The focus of my study was on problems in translation relating to the theme of racism. The main features and difficulties in translation that the source text presented were the translation of names, neologisms and the races mentioned. The novel falls into the science fiction, dystopian fiction and young adult fiction genres, and also deals with issues about race, which are both challenging and interesting from a translation perspective.

Natasha Ngan, the author, follows the main character’s daily life in Neo-Babel to her journey to the outside of the city when the president is killed and her parents disappear. The novel is about a post-apocalyptic city where different cultures live together in apparent peace. This dissertation analyses the translation into Spanish of excerpts from the novel The Elites, written in 2013 by Natasha Ngan.

The Elites by Natasha Ngan