A feminist voice re/written in translation: A case study of the Arabic version of Joumana Haddad's I Killed Scheherazade.

The objective of this paper is to study to what extent we can read as 'feminist' the translation strategies used by translator Nour El-Assaad to produce the Arabic version of Joumana Haddad's book I Killed Scheherazade: Confessions of an Angry Arab Woman, originally written in English. The feminist translation approaches practiced in Quebec during the 1980s and 1990s worked to shed light on the ways in which translation can transfer and foreground the feminist voice and ideology within the specific geographical scope of that time. This paper thus revisits earlier paradigms and strategies, such as supplementing and hijacking, developed by Canadian feminist translators and writers, namely Luise von Flotow (1991/1997), Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood (1990) and Sherry Simon (1996), in order to study their resonance with the translation of feminist texts produced in the Arabic-speaking context. Since these approaches have never been applied in the context of the Arab world and specifically in Lebanon, this paper opens more discussion on the politics of feminist texts crossing different borders and cultures via translation. It shows how El-Assaad's interventions and strategies reshape the Arabic version of the book so that the force of Haddad's feminist message is amplified in some places and mitigated in others. However, further research is needed to investigate more questions such as the effect of the understanding of Arab feminism(s) and the translator's ideology on the translation of feminist texts produced in the Arab world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]