TRANSLATION, IDEOLOGY, AND THE MAKING OF MEANING: ARAB WOMEN'S LITERATURE IN ENGLISH

Abstract

This dissertation examines ideological translation issues that arise in English translations of selected Arab literary works: Woman at Point Zero (El Saadawi, 1975), Women of Sand and Myrrh (Hanan al-Shaykh, 1989), Girls of Riyadh (Raja Alsanea, 2007), Celestial Bodies (Jokha Alharthi, 2010), The Dove’s Necklace (Raja Alem, 2011), All That I Want to Forget (Al-Essa, 2013). This project attempts to answer the questions: how and under what conditions do translation decisions utilized in the corpus reconfigure a source text’s meaning? Do such translations shift target readers’ attributions, sympathies, and cultural inferences? And how do patronage-driven, target culture poetics and feminist ideology mediate these effects across the selected translations? This dissertation focuses on themes of clothing, status, and freedom because they tend to be the most discussed themes in such activist texts. This dissertation employs a mixed-method approach that combines linguistic analysis with cultural analysis, drawing on André Lefevere’s concept of translation as re-writing. This method begins with linguistic analysis, taking into consideration the receiving system’s ideology, poetics, and readers’ expectations, and then situates the findings within the broader cultural meanings of both source and target cultures. Ultimately, the cross-textual analysis of the selected corpus revealed that the translation choices resulted in three main consequences. The first is a pattern of invoking and enforcing clothing-related stereotypical images. This tendency is mostly implemented by heavy cultural clarification/explicitation whenever a piece of clothing is mentioned in one of the source texts. The second major finding is a pattern of (over)victimization of female characters, whether through shifting the plot, changes of perspective, or even undermining tiny moments of victory. The third finding pertains to the second finding, which exploits the scene of violence or oppression to foreground and, at times, shift the plot around to invoke and enforce male oppression. The final major finding is the absolutizing of the concept of freedom. This pattern stems from a Western understanding of the concept of freedom as an undivided whole, thus undermining the partial freedoms promoted and celebrated in the source texts. This dissertation also found that all the key findings stated above were made possible through three main translation procedures: excessive clarification of cultural clothing-related terms and moments, intensification of critical words and phrases and moments of tension, and major alterations, whether through additions, omissions, or direct changes in perspective.