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

This translation sought to challenge readers more moderately and
accommodate anticipated audience expectations while maintaining as much of the
original tone, voice and cultural flavor as possible. A balance was struck between
asking the reader to conform to the beliefs, customs, language and literary
formalism of the source culture and conforming more to the receiving audience's
cultural and linguistic expectations. Ultimately, any translation of a narrative set
in a Muslim Arab context will present the non-Muslim non-Arab reader with a
considerable quantity of new cultural information, and I believe that even the
most domesticated translation will be quite resistant enough. When a narrative is
set in another context and depicts characters foreign to readers, even a smooth
translation will constantly remind the reader that the story comes from elsewhere.
Such a text is not in much danger of domestication. However, it does risk
presenting the reader with such a high degree of unknowability that the reader
puts the book down, in which case the translation will have defeated its own
purpose. To avoid this consequence, when translating a counter-discursive, hybrid
and defamiliarizing text, I decided to moderate the information load for the
reader.
Even a highly domesticated translation of this subgenre of literature into
English validates the original text and culture in terms of dominant Anglophone
cultures and expands the readers’ horizon of expectation. 44 Since English is the
leading language of international relations, translating a Muslim Arab woman's
narrative into English asserts to Anglophone readers the previously ignored
44 Sukanta Chaudhuri, Translation and Understanding (New Delhi: Oxford UP,
1999) 16, 39.
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