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

The translator's decision to domesticate or foreignize the translation may
then depend on the translator's perception of the text and the LC2. In translating
La Baroudeuse, I needed to respect the tone and purposes of the original text but
recognized that the author's intended audience was not my own, and that my
purpose was not identical to the author's. Nouzha Fassi Fihri, who writes in
French, may well have been addressing primarily members of her own society
who immediately grasp the meaning and cultural significance of transcribed
Arabic words. Aware that many French people who do not know Arabic will read
the text, she included contextual clues to the meaning of the transcribed words,
but on the whole, tended to make great demands on French readers' willingness to
deduce meaning from context and accept cognitive gaps. Most American readers,
like most French readers, might experience transcribed Arabic words as elements
of a foreign language and culture, but these elements will probably not have the
same effect on American readers. Unlike the French, Americans are not likely to
feel directly, historically involved in the colonization of North Africa and its bitter
fight for independence. Americans are far more likely to read this narrative as a
third party, identifying neither with the primary Moroccan perspective, nor with
the secondary and criticized French perspective, but feeling an affinity with
elements of both perspectives as both a former colony and a colonizer. The
narrative point of view and extensive use of transcribed Arabic words in the
French text may well remind the French reader of the long, painful, emotionally
charged relationship between France and Morocco. Since Americans do not
entertain the same relationship with Morocco, such textual hybridity would not
have the same effect on American readers.
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