Spanglish

So, I'm reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz, right now and it's mostly written in Spanglish, which Wikipedia tells me is not a pidgin language. Fine. It's not pidgin. I still love it. I love the constant code-switching between English and Spanish because, heck sometimes English works but sometimes you need to say pendejo.Here's a great sentence from the book:"Hey, Dionisio, isn't that the girl que dio una pela last week?"This book won a Pulitzer and it's easy to see why. It's a heck of a read, with wonderfully dynamic, fully-human characters, set in that Pulitizer-friendly context of third world history. I'm learning about the history of Trujillo and the Dominican Republic and it doesn't even hurt. Full of win, the whole thing really.But...Should he have translated the oodles of Spanish into English for his English readers?I have no trouble with it because I speak Spanish, but a good friend of mine, an avid reader who I know would have loved this book, actually put it down because she couldn't understand large portions of it. It just irritated her. Clearly, Senor Diaz is under no obligacion to make things mas facil por sus readers Americanos y Igleses.Pero…Should he have?Like with a glossary of Spanish terms in the back?Just curious.