Visibility, Appropriation and Subversion in English Translations of Arabic Pseudo-Narratives

Abstract

This thesis sets out to investigate the heuristic forms of license and appropriation to which the English translation of prototypes of Arabic prose narratives, namely Alf Layla wa Layla, Kalila wa Dinma and Sirat ʻAntara have been subject. Through a thorough analysis of the various translations of these texts, that vastly range from a bowdlerized domesticating rendering to foreignizing literal rewording, it approaches the act of translation as a rewriting and representation of the image of the original text that permits the translator, from his power-vested position as a Westerner over an Oriental text, to strip the latter of its character and individual identity. This thesis tries to account for the translator’s visibility in and appropriation of the original as less emanating from any disinterested theoretical or procedural understanding of translation as from deliberate actions and conscious choices, and as less entailed by a deficit in equivalence between the two natural languages involved in the translation as by a felt need to put the foreign text into the service of a variety of purposes and to make it fit with the poetic and ideological imperatives, expectations and prejudices of the receiving system. The present study uses a qualitative method that seeks to provide a holistic understanding of the phenomenon under study. The analysis of data involves the three basic stages characteristic of this approach, i.e. description, analysis and interpretation. In investigating the forms of appropriation and manipulation to which Arabic pseudo-narratives were subject in English translations, I tried to make sure that the case studies are adequately representative of and methodologically sampling the topic of the thesis, and also that they demonstrate sufficient similarities and systematic relations that allow for their coding within a comprehensive interpretive model. Our line of inquiry led us to conclude that appropriation was a systematic and regular translation behaviour in the transfer of Arabic pseudo-narratives into English and that despite the wide differences that existed among the individual translators, its realization in their actual translations differs in form not in essence, in manifestation not in character.