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

Lawrence Venuti’s and André Lefevere’s paradigmatic structures
influenced my analysis of original texts and translation processes, though their
concepts of and approaches to translation diverge. Venuti acknowledges
Schleiermacher in distinguishing between the translator who chooses a
"domesticating method, an ethnocentric reduction of the foreign text to target-
language cultural values, bringing the author back home" and the translator who
chooses a "foreignizing method, an ethnodeviant pressure on those values to
register the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text, sending the
reader abroad." 29 Foreignizing techniques include the use of transcribed foreign
words, literal translations of proverbs and sayings, and paratextual devices such as
glossaries and notes. Venuti calls for translators to insist on "foreignizing
translation" to open "spaces for new ideas, concepts of alterity, and literary
innovation." 30 He argues for translator visibility and against textual fluency,
advocating what he calls "resistant" translation, which makes the reader
constantly aware of reading a translation, a text shaped by the translator's choices.
He encourages translators to refuse fluency to guide the reader to question the
easy codes of the exotic ("Invisibility" 18). This approach presents translation as
an act of political resistance against cultural hegemony. Reading Venuti has
enhanced my awareness of potential linguistic and cultural power differentials in
post-colonial translation and helped me more clearly discern my own approach to
29 Lawrence Venuti, "Translation as Cultural Politics: Regimes of Domestication
in English," Textual Practice 7.2 (1993): 210.
30 Lawrence Venuti, "The Translator's Invisibility," Criticism 28 (Spring 1986):
18.
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