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

audiences" as she felt alienated from her own "broadly conceived English-
speaking non-scholarly 'intended audience' most of whom, [she] knew, couldn't
care less about Arabic literature." She feels "strongly about the political
responsibility of translators (. . .) in trying to complicate" the readers'
comprehension of Muslim Arab societies.
The sense of political responsibility correlated positively to the translator's
awareness of audience and self. Denys Johnson-Davies paid little attention to
audience since he "realized that, for English readers, the material was outside
their experience." He "was always aware that much of what [he] translated would
appear utterly strange to the foreign reader." Marjolijn de Jager indicates that she
rarely though of audience in definite terms, imagining rather "people who love to
read, who are curious about cultures and worlds other than the one they know."
Neither of these two translators volunteered an opinion concerning a translator's
political responsibility. Barbara Parmenter imagined a more specific audience of
Americans "interested in learning more about North Africa." Though Marilyn
Booth indicated that at the time of writing she was only "vaguely" aware of
audience, in retrospect, she identifies her audience as a group "as broad and
unprofessional as possible." Similarly, Catherine Cobham "wasn't consciously
imagining an audience for [her] translation of Hanan's novels," but realizes, in
retrospect, that her concept of audience must have had some influence on her
translation choices. She identifies this audience as including
general readers rather than people with a specific interest in the Arab
world (. . .) fairly cosmopolitan mother tongue English reading public
(. . .) who don't habitually read novels but are curious to know more about
the Arab world (. . .) Arabs who prefer (. . .) to read novels in English
(. . .) some friends and colleagues, but not others.
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