Arab Women's Representation in Arab Women's Writing and Their Translation

摘要

The encounter of translation studies with feminism has resulted in a number of studies concerned with how social, sexual and historical differences are expressed in language and the ways in which they can be transferred across languages (Hall, Jacquemond, Maier, Massardier-Kenney, Said, Simon, and Salazar among others). While a number of these studies show that language and translation play a significant role in the way women are represented in literature, and argue that this representation cannot be separated from the society and culture which produces it, little work has been done on Arabic literature, a gap this study seeks to address. Using quantitative textual analysis focusing on 10 novels written by Arab women writers and corpus tools, the study demonstrates that Arab women are still represented in Arabic literature in terms of stereotypical images as oppressed and victimized, even in literature written by Arab women. In turn, these texts are selected for translation into English and the translations themselves emphasize the victimization of women characters represented in the source text, and thus translation participates in the construction of stereotypes about Arab women. The selected novels were written in Arabic by Arab women writers between 1980--2010 and translated into English by women translators in the period between 2000 and 2015. The study analyzes nouns, adjectives and verbs that collocate with women-associated terms to determine the patterns of women's representation in Arabic and English texts. The study also seeks to determine if the country of origin of the author, the time of publishing and the gender of the author/translator influence the way Arab women are portrayed. The findings of the study show three main patterns of Arab women's images: the victimized, the escapee and the pawn. It also shows that English translations reflect the same patterns of Arab women observed in the source texts. Furthermore, the findings show that neither time, nationality, nor gender seem to have an impact on the way women are represented.