Multilingual Culture-Specific Items and Ideology in the Translation of Assia Djebar's Quartet

Abstract

In theory, translation is supposed to be neutral and the translator independent, but in practice, it is far from being the case. Because of the cultural significance of words and the impact of the socio-political context, texts are usually loaded with a dose of ideology. Furthermore, since the translation process is deeply rooted in culture, it is never devoid of ideology. Words carry connoted meanings explicitly or implicitly, and the choice of words and style reveals or conceals the writers’ and translators’ intentions. Faced with this cultural and ideological burden, translators are often confronted with a dilemma. They do not know whether they must explain and transpose the culture and ideology or maintain them implicitly. They do not know whether they should take a stand or stick to the sacrosanct neutrality of the translators. Therefore, the thesis aims to probe how the translators translate culturally and ideologically charged words and structures and what they do to detect these patterns by sorting out the themes behind which they are hidden and the way they are expressed in texts. The thesis examines the different micro-level and macro-level strategies translators use to translate texts overloaded with cultural and ideological references. To materialize the problem, the thesis analyzes the challenges of translating culture and ideology in Assia Djebar’s unfinished Algerian Quartet, written in French and translated into English by Dorothy Blair and Betsy Wing. By adopting a methodological framework that combines four paradigms, the method adopted for the realization of this analysis is a descriptive method based on studying the phenomena qualitatively and quantitatively. Although Djebar writes in French, her writing language mixes words and concepts from other multilingual cultures. Thus, this genre of writing can be interpreted as a resistance to France and subversion of the French language, which creates an alienating effect on the French-speaking readership. Surprisingly, it was noticed that multilingual words are cultural references by default. That is why the denomination Multilingual Culture-Specific Items was adopted to refer to them. In translating these multilingual and cultural texts, the translator’s ideology is to maintain the strangeness without creating too complicated texts that make the pleasure of reading disappear. Just like the original novels, the translations are also books filled with foreign words and multilingual culture-specific items, causing an alienating effect on the readers. The translation artworks also produce the same ideological and cultural effects in the target culture as in the source culture.