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

Theorists such as Edward Said and Mary Louise Pratt offer critical
paradigms particularly appropriate for my analysis of characteristics and
techniques of post-colonial literature. Said argues the value of recognizing
cultural groundedness, power relationships and pragmatic effects in literature. 27
His paradigm suggests the need to evaluate the rhetorical effects of the original
text, identify the translator’s perspective and purpose, and project the
sociocultural as well as linguistic expectations of the receiving audience. Also
attentive to the sociocultural grounding of the post-colonial literary text, Mary
Louise Pratt proposes the term "contact zone" to refer to "the space of colonial
encounters . . . in which peoples geographically and historically separated come
into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving
conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict." 28 Pratt notes
that in this zone, modes of representation from the metropolis are received and
appropriated by groups on the periphery, and modes of representation from the
periphery are received and appropriated by the metropolis (6). Her paradigm
offers further perspectives on the tensions of the Moroccan contact zone in which
modernizing elements of society appropriate the French language to counter-
discursively represent themselves to national and international audiences.
Translating post-colonial texts into another Western language can be seen as an
extension of this interactive process.
27 Edward W Said, The World, the Text and the Critic (London: Vintage, 1991).
28 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes, Travel Writing and Transculturation (New
York: Routledge, 1992) 6.
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