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

CONSIDERING LC1 AND LC2 AUDIENCES 5
Knowing that the author lived in Casablanca, less than an hour from my
home in Rabat, I contacted her and arranged for an interview. 6 We talked about
the inspiration, characterization, themes, audiences and purposes of her novel.
Nouzha Fassi Fihri affirms that she wrote La Baroudeuse out of a desire to honor
traditions she felt were being lost and with the intention of recording recent
Moroccan history from a Moroccan rather than French perspective. I translated La
Baroudeuse to carry her voice and perspective to Anglophone readers, and to
share what I felt to be an unusual and worthwhile message with others who would
otherwise never hear this voice or experience this perspective. Nevertheless, I
realized that our worldviews were considerably different. She had written and I
was translating the text for reasons that were similar, but not identical. I sensed
that however faithful I intended to be to the original text, I would be writing for
an audience whose cultural and historical knowledge of this narrative's context
varied greatly from that of the author's original intended audiences.
Nouzha Fassi Fihri acknowledged that she wrote this narrative in French
rather than Arabic for two audiences and various reasons. She wrote for the
generation of young Moroccans who had attended French schools so that they
might learn of Moroccan traditions and recent history as Moroccans tell and write
5 Lance Hewson and Jacky Martin, Redefining Translation, The Variational
Approach (New York: Routledge, 1991). Hewson uses the symbols "LC1" to
refer to the language and culture that gave rise to the original text and "LC2" to
indicate the language and cultural context of the translation.
6 Nouzha Fassi Fihri, personal interview, 18 June 1998. For full text, see
Appendix A.
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