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The issue of difference in translation is the outcome of an important paradigm shift in the conception of language and its definition during the early twentieth century. Translation scholars reconsidered the traditional discourse about equivalence in translation and started to problematize it by emphasizing the intricate textual and cultural constraints the translator has to deal with while moving from one language to another. These scholars have tackled translation, literary translation in particular, as a creative activity and as a process of interpretation and transformation, or even as a resurrection of the source text. Moreover, the postcolonial theory of translation has recently viewed difference as a resistant discourse in contemporary Translation Studies. For instance, Homi Bhabha used his concept of “Cultural translation” to refer to the cultural movements associated with globalization and the subsequent hybrid cultural configurations. “Cultural translation is a metaphor that shows how the concept of translation is entering a completely new phase and assuming radically new forms and meanings. The meaning of translation has been enlarged to defy its definition as a simple interlingua transfer and moves it forward to indicate the “linguistic and hermeneutic transfer and the interpretative act of mediating cultural difference.” Building on the argument above, my paper seeks to realize a comparative study between Leila Abouzeid’s autobiographic Arabic text رجوع إلى الطفولة and its translation into English Return to Childhood, which she realized in collaboration with her American translator Heather Taylor. My ultimate objective is to see how Moroccan cultural differences are translated from (Moroccan) Arabic into English, especially that Western traditions in translating from Arabic have usually aimed at delivering “fixed”, “naturalized” and "dehistoricized" images of its people. "Master Western Narratives about Arab and Islamic culture” as Said Faiq argues, "still rely on Western translations which reinforce the same cultural representations Orientalism has created: the images of a complicated orient, irremediably strange and different; yet familiar and exotic.” (2) Most importantly, I want to consider to what extent the discourse of the English translation goes in line with Leila Abouzeid’s original Arabic Postcolonial text. In the preface of her Arabic autobiography, Abouzeid announces herself as a postcolonial writer who seeks to unsettle the homogenizing politics underpinning western translations of Arabic and Moroccan cultures. Accordingly, Abouzeid assumes her role as a cultural broker and translates her autobiography from Arabic into English in order to negotiate her cultural differences by enhancing her different Moroccan and Muslim identity.
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