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

Soon the call to prayer would announce dawn to the sleeping population,
and each person would busy himself, first to perform ablutions and the
dawn prayer (. . .)
The pronoun se in the reflexive verb phrase in French elides the notion of gender,
whereas the English equivalent of this phrase calls for the use of a gendered
pronoun: "himself" or "herself." To avoid the erroneous implication that only men
or women pray, the sentence needed to be rephrased in English.
Readers made notably few comments about characterization or
unacceptable imagery. None objected to the portrayal of an unusual protagonist,
the kind of character Virginia Woolf exhorted her readers to demand of writers:
an old lady "saying anything and doing heaven knows what." 20 The Islamic
feminist discourse of the authorial narrator incited no specific comment. The
majority of the readers’ comments concern register, diction, metaphorical
language, determinacy of speakers and representation of narrative perspective.
Readers expected characters’ reported speech to sound like a person speaking and
doubted that a person would say, for example: "huge popular demonstrations were
quickly repressed by the forces of law and order" ("de grandes manifestations
populaires se sont organisées, vite réprimées par les forces de l'ordre" [18]). These
comments required a translation decision: to respect the author's decision to have
her characters speak in a highly "literate" style, or to accommodate readers'
expectations of distinction between written and spoken language.
In the original, the author has people on the street speak the way
journalists write. The effect of this technique is to suggest that even the illiterate
20 Virginia Woolf, "Character in Fiction," The Criterion 2 (1924): 430.
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