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

The original title--La Baroudeuse--is the feminine form of the French
neologism baroudeur. According to Le Robert quotidien, this word entered
French military jargon in the early 1920's, derived from the Moroccan Berber
word baroud meaning "combat." 49 This dictionary defines the phrase baroud
d'honneur as "the last battle of a lost war, fought for honor" with a figurative
meaning of "a hopeless battle." The word baroudeur is defined as a colloquial
word meaning one who loves an honorable battle even without the hope of
winning.
The translation of this title as "The Fighter" loses the linguistic and
discursive transgression and irony but retains some of the functions of the original
title. The feminine form of a French word borrowed from Moroccan Arabic, the
original title alludes to the influence of the colonized people and the indigenous
language on the colonizer and the colonial language. The French title also
reminds French and Moroccan readers that Moroccans fought alongside French
soldiers in Indonesia and won the respect of their colonial masters. Using a
masculine word from military jargon to refer to a cloistered woman, the original
title subverts gender and discourse boundaries and gives a first indication of the
narrative's counter-discursive tendency. The title in translation lacks many of
these effects but retains the connotations of tension and respect and acts as a
unifying strand throughout the narrative as did the original title.
In many instances, greater knowledge of literary traditions, critical
paradigms, and reader expectations did reveal preferable alternatives and lead to
49 "baroud" and "baroudeur", Le Robert quotidien, Dictionnaire pratique de la
langue française (Montréal: Dicorobert Inc., 1996).
89