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

audiences and the original texts influenced translators’ during the process of
recreating texts that can be find a place in the receiving literary tradition.
Post-colonial novels by Muslim Arab women writers tend to challenge and
subvert dominant discourses and offer complex images of Arab culture, and
translations of these narratives can establish a place in the American literary
tradition. Al-Shaykh's Women of Sand and Myrrh, for example, is a thoroughly
naturalized translation in that the text reads as though it were originally written in
English without preface, introduction, notation, or glossary. Though it presents
counter-discursive images of Arab women, it has been well received and widely
acclaimed because it develops themes that correspond to values in various
currents of American feminist discourse, for example, and allows the reader to
forget that it is a translation. La Baroudeuse also offers images and voices values
with which most feminists can identify, but defends itself against transparent
naturalization into another language. The extensive use of colloquial and classical
Arabic in the French text creates a hybrid, defamiliarizing and counter-discursive
text for the original French reader and for Anglophone readers, to the extent that
the translator has chosen to maintain these elements. Furthermore, the narrator's
close affiliation with her cultural context demands that the reader be brought into
this context, leaving little leeway for bringing the narrative "back home" to the
reader. Since the narrative itself demands a certain degree of defamiliarization,
the translation might encounter more reader resistance than did Women of Sand
and Myrrh.
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