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

existence of this voice and allows it to join the global conversation taking place in
English. The translation of this historical fiction offers Anglophone readers a
complex and realistic portrayal of Muslim Arab men and women and a culture
that most have not had the opportunity to experience. Inevitably, the translator's
political opinions and social attitudes always participate in the creation of even
the most transparent translation. Purposefully resistant translations might too
overtly insert the translator's presence and skew the text.
Rather than consciously create a resistant translation, when working with
this kind of narrative, my decision has been to make every effort to recreate the
effect of the original but avoid density of cultural information that would call
attention to the language and disrupt the reading. To this purpose, I gave the
translated equivalent of the meaning and used transcribed words and paratextual
explanations only when equivalent terms do not exist and cannot be formed in the
receiving language (García Yebra 335). However, by including untranslated
words in the text, I aimed to avoid "erasing" the original in the effort to translate it
(Karamcheti 194). A glossary was provided to help the reader understand these
foreign words and phrases without interrupting the text with definitions that
distract the reader from the narrative and distort the hierarchy of themes.
INFLUENCES THAT CAN AFFECT THIS TRANSLATION PROCESS
The language and culture of the original and of the translation and patrons'
expressed opinions played a central role in my translation decisions, but at the
solitary moment of writing, potential reader response exercised the most
69