Silvia Bruti (Pisa), Roberto A. Valdeón (Oviedo), Serenella Zanotti (Roma Tre) Translating Ethnicity: Linguistic and Cultural Issues The concept of ethnicity Ethnicity is a fluid concept whose meaning has been shifting over time, influenced by societal and cultural issues. While the term is commonly used interchangeably with race to indicate biologically and culturally stable identities, recent studies have shown that there is nothing stable and objective about ethnicity and that both ethnicity and race are rather to be regarded as ‘cultural constructs promoted, transgressed, defended or reworked in language, discourse and social activity’ (Harris and Rampton 2003: 6). As Stuart Hall argues in his seminal essay ‘New Ethnicities’ (1989), ethnicity is ‘a constructed process rather than a given essence’ (Loomba 1998:176) and is inescapably contextual: ‘The term ethnicity acknowledges the place of history, language and culture in the construction of subjectivity and identity, as well as the fact that all discourse is placed, positioned, situated, and all knowledge is contextual’ (Hall 1996: 29). According to Spencer (2014: 58), the association of race with scientific racism and Nazism has led to a preference for ethnicity as a less loaded term; in fact, it is now the only acceptable term for ‘otherness’ in multicultural societies such as Britain, Canada and Australia. Yet the concept is widely debated, with some calling it a very unstable notion in a ‘constant state of formation and reformulation’ (Molina 2006: 247), others arguing that the concept is relatively stable (Vader 2001: 261). The concept is also very often linked with religion, nationality and language (De Fina 2000: 134). Ethnicity and language Language is an important means through which individuals express ethnic identity. According to Fishman (1989: 32), ‘language is even more than symbolic of the ethnic message, it is a prime ethnic value in and of itself’. Ethnicity is thus traditionally correlated with linguistic variation and language itself is a key factor in the definition of ethnicity (see Harris and Rampton 2003, Fishman and García 2010). One example of this is provided by the US Census Office, which categorizes American population according to race (white, black…) and ethnicity (with particular attention to the Hispanic minority (see Bradby and Nazroo 2010: 117). As Wolfram and Schilling-Estes (2006: 191) point out, ‘ethnic groups tend to form subcultures within the larger culture, and part of the distinctiveness of these subcultures may be constructed through the use of linguistic forms’. The correlation between ethnicity and language variation, however, is complicated by the interaction of ethnicity with factors such as region, social class, and language background, which also have a part in determining the characteristics of ethnic