aracter nicknames presented a problem when trying to adopt my foreignization approach; I wanted to preserve the cultural associations linked to the nickname without alienating the reader. One of the greatest challenges was deciding how to translate La Negra [161] in the short story ‘El apuntamiento’. La Negra or simply Negra is used throughout Latin America as ‘a common term of endearment, frequently, if not necessarily, detached from any direct identification of race’ (Nunes, 2002, p. 52). While I was tempted to either leave La Negra in the Spanish (as an exoticism) or leave it in Spanish and explain the nickname’s roots in a footnote, I ultimately decided against these two options. Firstly, if I were to leave it in Spanish, I would have lost the fact that the name is a term of endearment. In fact, readers with an elementary knowledge of Spanish (or other Romance languages) might identify the nickname as meaning black which evokes different connotations. Secondly, if I were to provide a footnote, this would distract the reader from the text, as I discuss further on. Instead, I decided to use an equivalent term of affection when the protagonist was addressing or talking about his girlfriend: babe and my girl respectively.

Similarly, I found it difficult to translate the protagonist’s description of the old lady from the flat below as la vieja, la vieja flaca, and la vieja de mierda at various points in ‘Bzzz’. This is because it is common in Spanish to describe and address people based on their physical characteristics (Landers, 2001), whereas this is not the case in English. However, I decided to follow my foreignizing strategy and opt for a literal translation. The protagonist first refers to her as la vieja flaca esa [41]. In this instance, the demonstrative adjective esa is used and placed after the noun to be critical or derogatory (Steel, 1985). Therefore, I translated the phrase as: that skinny, old woman.

When considering other terms of address, I followed by ‘overt’ translation strategy where I thought the reader would recognise the Spanish word. For example, I culturally ‘borrowed’ the word Se