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

challenged and reformed in ways that encourage international understanding, a
necessity for survival in these times of daily and often violent interaction between
the Arab and Anglophone worlds.
My purpose in translating this novel was to make heard these voices of
women emerging from silence, to lower the barrier of language so that
Anglophone readers might have the opportunity to learn of a Muslim Arab culture
from an internal, feminine point of view. I wished to share the realization that
potentially surprising foreign elements can relate to that which is familiar. Across
cultures, many of the same things concern us. The tensions inherent in this kind of
text and in the effort to translate it, however, raised questions about audience.
The present study aims to document and analyze the potential influence of
audience and other elements in the translation of this kind of novel into English.
Chapter 1 is a case study of the process of translating La Baroudeuse into English,
Chapter 2 defines the translation process and outlines an approach to translating
this kind of narrative into English, and Chapter 3 compares the initial and final
versions of the translation to observe the effects of influences on this translation
process. Chapter 4 offers the final version of my translation of The Fighter.
THE TEXT
Nouzha Fassi Fihri published La Baroudeuse in Casablanca in 1997, more
than fifty years after the leaders of the Istiqlal party presented the Independence
Manifesto (1944), and more than forty years after Morocco gained independence
from France (1956). Set in Fez in 1944, the novel recounts the lives of Lalla
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