Abstract
This paper will explore the concept of the “untranslatablity” of Arabic through examining three specific translation issues related to "Da’iman Coca Cola" [Always Coca Cola] the first novel by Lebanese author, Alexandra Chreiteh. From its title, a global advertising slogan for the most globalized of all products—Coca Cola—to its use of straightforward fusha and its many references familiar to an English-language reading audience, translating this novel seems at first glance deceptively simple. In practice, however, a number of specific translation challenges are linked to moving a work that is seemingly “familiar” in content and imagery from Arabic into English. This paper will build a theoretical argument about un/translatability by looking at three specific issues.
Firstly, it will examine passages, written in standard Arabic but in which the characters are meant to be speaking English. For example, the novel often says, in Arabic, “then she said in English” and proceeds with a sentence written in Arabic. This level of metacommentary that complicates the translation process is under-theorized in translation studies, and absent in studies of Arabic-English translation. The second issue is how best to represent the moves between registers in Arabic in an English translation. "Da’iman Coca Cola" is written almost exclusively in a simplified fusha-- one that often recalls the colloquial language of Lebanon. It is also, however, punctuated at key moments by Lebanese Arabic expressions, many of which rhyme, some of which are funny and all of which are “untranslateable.” The third issue that the paper will take up is the use of English words within the Arabic text itself and how to deal with these in translation. One example is that the title of the book “Da’iman Coca Cola” refers in Arabic to the slogan “Always Coca Cola”. At times within the text, however, the expression in English—Always Coca Cola—is included in Latin letters. In one example, the protagonist uses the English expression to make a pun off of “Always” as a brand of sanitary napkins. How can and should a translation treat words that appear sometimes in English, sometimes in Arabic?
Building from this concrete discussion of translation choices and proposing possibilities for how specific passages might be translated, this paper will also draw from current translation theory in order to draw some conclusions about how we can theorize Arabic-English literary translation and “untranslateability.”
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