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

and in these cases the translator takes care to differentiate her own paratext from
the author's, as Marjolijn de Jager does in Sebbar’s An Algerian Childhood. In this
collection of sixteen autobiographical short stories by French, Berber, Muslim,
and Jewish Algerian authors now living in France, the format and content of the
publication dictate much of the paratext, but little of the paratext is attributable to
the translator. Both the authors and the translator use footnotes to explain
transcribed Arabic words and cultural concepts that their audiences might not
implicitly understand. Translating their childhood experiences in Algeria for a
French audience, most of these authors chose to transcribe Arabic words and to
complement contextual explanations with footnotes explaining allusions that
would otherwise be lost on French readers. In a second translation from French to
English, given the even greater cultural and linguistic distance, Marjolijn de Jager
occasionally saw the need to add further paratextual explanation (128, 171).
Denys Johnson-Davies and Marilyn Booth usually make moderate use of
notation. Translating Rifaat’s Distant View of a Minaret from Arabic to English,
Denys Johnson-Davies offers notes at the end of every story to explain only a few
words. More often, he explains transcribed Arabic words only in the context, such
as the words galabia and muezzin (5, 3). He evidently felt that the meaning of
these words was clear enough from context and chose to offer no further
paratextual explanation, especially since English dictionaries list these words. In
My Grandmother's Cactus, Marilyn Booth explains in one note that "the shop that
sells trotters and tongues" is the translation of "the 'masmat', a shop-restaurant
selling offal and offering sandwiches made with these relatively cheap animal
products" (21, 23). Presumably, the phrase "trotters and tongues" conveys both
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