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

and phrases from Arabic and Turkish tends to fulfill an introductory rather than a
supplemental function. It serves to forewarn the reader that the following text will
require readers to behave as translators, a warning likely to appeal to a scholarly,
academic audience in search of challenge. Many of the words in the glossary of
Fantasia also appear in English dictionaries--for example, the words "aga",
"amir", and "janizary"--though the glossary definitions tend to include slightly
more detail specific to the narrative. Including words in the glossary even if they
appear in the dictionary expands the glossary, making it even more impressive for
the reader, but also facilitates the reading for those who do not know these words
of Arabic and Turkish origin, would not get a clear enough image from the
context, and would not guess that they are in English dictionaries. The translator's
decisions about what to include in the glossary seem to have been motivated by
her aim to replicate the kinds of demands the author makes of her readers and by
her desire to accommodate the presumed knowledge level and expectations of her
own audience.
Though Genette does not include the use of italics in his definition of
paratext, italics allude to elements beyond the text, in glossaries and footnotes, but
also in other texts and languages, and therefore need to be considered in a
paratextual analysis of this kind of translation. As well as the language of the
original, the narrative viewpoint of the original text largely determines whether
the translator will feel the need to transcribe and italicize words in the translation.
The narrator in al-Shaykh’s Women of Sand and Myrrh, for example, is a
Lebanese woman who describes the lives of foreign or marginalized women in
another Arabian culture. Though she is an Arab woman in an Arab country, she is
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