Translating Nouzha Fassi Fihri's La Baroudeuse: A Case Study in ...

en cadeau à sa fille pour une première naissance et qu'on avait enveloppés
dans des nappes brodées. (53)
24 i: Next came the negafat balancing on their heads the trousseau and
baby's layette, wrapped in embroidered cloths, gifts for the woman who
had given birth, sent by an affluent family to their daughter on the
occasion of the birth of her first child.
negafat glossed: Women who dress the bride and organize the wedding
ceremony.
24 f: Next came the negafats balancing on their heads the trousseau and
the baby's layette wrapped in embroidered cloths and gifts the affluent
family had sent to their daughter to celebrate the birth of her first child.
negafats footnoted and glossed: Women “hired to attend the bride during
the wedding ceremony,” according to Richard Harrell’s Dictionary of
Moroccan Arabic: Arabic-English (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown UP,
1966) 18.
In this passage, these women act as porters in a procession that is part of a
traditional birth ceremony. In other passages, they gather funds to support the
resistance movement. These women belong to a social group for which there is no
equivalent word in English or concept in Anglophone cultures. They are female
service providers who impose their will on others and are respected for what they
do, in spite of their low status as "public" women who live and work in society as
opposed to hidden from the gaze of men. Neither the transcribed word nor the
footnote conveys this information to the reader, but the narrative sufficiently
illustrates this implicit cultural information. The transcribed word was maintained
to signal that these women belong to a recognized social group and that the
characteristics of these women should be perceived as pertaining to the members
of this culturally specific profession.
The initial version included and glossed most of the transcribed Arabic
words that Nouzha Fassi Fihri had included in the French text, on the assumption
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