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

these words can be found in English dictionaries. The translator and editor do not
italicize these adopted foreign words in the text though they include them in the
glossary for readers’ benefit. The translator's use of italics shows that she
replicates the author's relationship with audience but makes an effort to facilitate
the reading.
While some of these works offer little or no translator preface, others
include translators' prefaces that explicitly address translation audience, approach
and rationale. Al-Shaykh’s Women of Sand and Myrrh provides no introductory
material. In this case, though the narrative setting is foreign, the lack of paratext
puts the reader directly in contact with the narrative and leads the reader to look
for and experience that which is familiar and recognizable in the foreign
characters, situations, and events. The text itself facilitates the reader's entry into
this foreign context. This fiction tells of four women living a traditional Arab
country, but the characters relate marginally and rebelliously to this culture, and
the narrator's voice and tone identify more with a Western perspective.
Abouzeid’s Year of the Elephant and Sebbar’s An Algerian Childhood include
extensive introductory paratext, but none of it is attributable to the translator in
either work.
In the "Translator's Foreword" for Rifaat’s Distant View of a Minaret,
Denys Johnson-Davies concedes that the "mental landscape" is "unfamiliar to
most Western readers," but asserts that the reader can relate to "the directness and
the sincerity of the writing"(ix). In the four-page introduction for Bakr’s The
Wiles of Men, he offers information about the author and aims to shape readers'
expectations and perceptions. Describing the protagonists of the stories he
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