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

illustrates the effort to reduce concurrent metaphors to make the wording more
concise.
12 o: elle avait su braver père et mère et toute la horde de tantes et
cousines, toujours prêtes à immerger les autres femmes dans cette mer de
convenances où elle s'était (sic) enlisées elles-mêmes depuis l'enfance.
(67)
12 i: she had managed to stand up to her father, her mother and a whole
horde of aunts and girl cousins who were always ready to submerge other
women in this sea of the conventions where they had been stranded since
childhood.
12 f: she had managed to stand up to her father, her mother and a whole
horde of aunts and girl cousins who were always ready to suffocate other
women with the conventions they had embroiled themselves in since
childhood.
The initial version of this phrase evokes images of land (stand up), land animals
(horde), air (suffocate), and water (sea). To mix fewer metaphors, the final
version eliminates the sea image. In example 13, an implied metaphor was
eliminated.
13 o: Pourquoi donc s'engager dans une résistance armée dont on ne
perçoit pas l'issue? (72)
13 i: So why engage in armed combat, if we can't foresee the outcome?
13 f: So why fight if we can't win?
The first version attempted to suggest the originally implied metaphor of entering
a tunnel without being able to see light at the end. The final version loses this
implicit metaphor but gains in rhythm, parallelism and rhetorical effect. The final
version also conveys the voice and tone readers might expect in this kind of
dialogue in this context.
The final version also occasionally revised poetic diction and complex
sentence structure to enhance clarity, as examples 14 and 15 illustrate.
85