Semiotic alteration in translation. Othering, stereotyping and hybridization in contemporary translations from Arabic into Spanish and Catalan

Abstract

It is already widely recognized that ‘foreignization’ is a cover word which stands for many different processes of cultural translation, from a problematic literalism which tends to exoticism, to a welcome but rarely achieved ‘othering’ understood as an ethical act of respect for the other ’s specificity. Seen from a pragmatic perspective, what still needs to be assessed are the reasons behind a hypothetic threshold of acceptability and the extent of the unstable and risky space where source culture expectations are challenged as a result of the translator ’s management of socio-cultural biases. Starting from the assumption that cultural translation implies a metonymical move by which key textual elements stand as symbols representing the foreign culture, the proposed article will present a scheme of the pragmatic and semiotic processes at work in translations from Arabic into Spanish and Catalan. A review of recent Spanish translations of contemporary Arabic fiction and the muchacclaimed Catalan translation of the Qur ’an will try to show that instances of hybridization and ambivalent readings occur foremost when semiotic categories are altered as a result of the familiarization of unexpected cultural referents. However, semiotic alteration only happens in the narrow margin allowed by the threshold of acceptability, which is the site of ambivalence.

Looking-glass game or the semiotics of otherness in Andalucía contra Berbería by Emilio García Gómez

“…This analysis works from an eclectic perspective combining three distinct, but complementary, methodological approaches: (a) the notion of paratext as proposed by Gérard Genette (1987); (b) the definitions of text, context and pretext as postulated by Widdowson (2004 and2007) and (c) the semiotic construction model of otherness and identity by Carbonell (2003Carbonell ( , 2004. All of these are considered within the general framework of discourse analysis.…”

“…Along the same lines, and also working from the premise according to which discourse not only acts as a vehicle of a given "way of seeing the world" but also has the capacity to "construct" certain forms of knowledge, Carbonell (2003) adds the construction of the Other to Fairclough's spectrum and proposes the following model of semiotic construction: Carbonell's model adopts four approaches to the construction of the Other, each of which are associated with given kinds of textual strategies. The first identifies the Other with the Self, that is, the one who conceives of otherness as something which is essentially being self.…”

“…Few studies have dealt, from a critical perspective, with the discourse (or discourses) concerning Arabic cultures and societies constructed by European academic Orientalism in general, or by the Spanish Arabism in particular. Assuming that translation, given its hybrid nature, plays a crucial role in the construction of othering discourses, this article attempts to analyse the identification and othering strategies used by García Gómez on the basis of a methodological approach that combines Genette's notion of paratext (1987), the notions of text, context and pretext proposed by Widdowson (2004 and2007) and the "Model of semiotic construction of the Other" developed by Carbonell (2003 and, all within the general framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). The results of this analysis show a significant othering of Berber and/or African references.…”

Translating the Cover – A Comparative Study of the Covers of Arabic Novels and Their English Translations

“…(Received 15 October 2022;accepted 4 December 2022) translation. Several studies have shown that during the twentieth century the cover designs of translated novels from Asia, India, and the Arab world were often constructed in a way that can be seen as foreignization since the covers make use of stereotypical images and exoticization (Lau 2015;Pears 2015;Serra Vilella 2021;Carbonell i Cortés 2003). In this article, I argue that the two terms 'domestication' and 'foreignization' are useful when the cover of a translated novel is studied, in particular the front cover design and the visual semiotics at work on the different covers.…”