Lost in Translation: A Feminist Translation Analysis of Nawal El Saadawi's Diary of A Child Called Souad | ||||
Transcultural Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences | ||||
Articles in Press, Accepted Manuscript, Available Online from 21 April 2024 | ||||
Document Type: Original papers | ||||
DOI: 10.21608/tjhss.2024.276484.1240 | ||||
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Author | ||||
Sarah Y ElMansy | ||||
College of Language & Communication (CLC) Arab Academy for Science Technology & Maritime Transport (AASTMT) | ||||
Abstract | ||||
By bringing together feminist studies, literary studies, and translation studies, a dialogic convergence emerges that enables a thorough exploration of power dynamics and resistance regarding the transformative roles of women as authors, translators, and social justice activists across various geohistorical contexts. A case in point is Nawal El Saadawi’s writings and their translations that are always associated with dissidence, or the act of opposing or challenging established power structures and dominant narratives. The aim of this paper is to study to what extent gender translation strategies are used by the translator Omnia Amin to produce the English version of Nawal El Saadawi’s Diary of a Child called Souad, originally written in Arabic. Thus, this paper revisits Flotow’s (1991/1997) gender translation strategies and Genette’s (1997) paratexts to study their resonance with the translation of a feminist text produced in the English-speaking context. In other words, this paper probes how various paratextual features can be strategically employed in the selected translated work to conform to the prevailing stereotypes held by the receiving culture. Specifically, the paper scrutinizes the translated version of El Saadawi’s “/mudhakkirāt tiflah asmuha saʕād/” to investigate how Arab women were portrayed in 1944. It opens more discussion on the politics of feminist texts crossing different borders and cultures via translation. It shows how Amin’s interventions reshape the English version of the book so that the force of ElSaadawi’s feminist message is amplified in some places and mitigated in others. Keywords: Feminist translation strategies, El Saadawi, translating feminist writers, paratext | ||||
Keywords | ||||
Feminist translation strategies; Nawal El Saadawi; translating feminist writers; paratext | ||||
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