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Colonial Subversive Mimicry: Translating Zionist Children's Literature into Arabic
Abstract by Loaay Wattad On Session X-26  (Palestine and Literature)

On Saturday, November 4 at 5:30 pm

2023 Annual Meeting

Abstract
As a result of the Israeli policy of restricting trade with most of the Arab world, the difficulty of importing children's books created an autarkic field of children's literature in Arabic within the borders of Israel. The disconnection from the Arab world created a need among authors and translators to develop unique literary mechanisms that would suit the field of Arabic children's literature in Israel. On the one hand, they had to preserve their Palestinian identity in the text. On the other hand, they wanted to succeed economically and therefore strived to be accepted by the Israeli Ministry of Education system. As a result of ambivalence in its goals and the disconnection from the Arab world, a complex industry of translating children's books from Hebrew to Arabic has been developed by translators. The translation between the languages in Israel is not a linguistic act in any way but rather a political act in all its elements since Hebrew children's literature in Israel is primarily ideological and national. Therefore a large part of its national messages remains even after the conscious translation of it. In my research, I examine translations of Israeli children's literature characterized by Zionist values into Arabic and examine the various tools and mechanics used by the translators to deal with the forced translational dissonance. This paper refers to three study cases of Israeli children's literature classics in which Zionist ideologies are particularly prominent: "Where is Pluto" [איה פלוטו, 1957], "A Tale of Five Balloons"[מעשה בחמישה בלונים, 1974] and "A Children's March[תהלוכה של ילדים, 2000], all of which include Zionist ideologies, and all of them translated into Arabic. Through each of the books, I offer a different way that the translators chose to deal with the paradoxical idea of translating Zionist children's literature into Arabic. For the analysis, use the concepts of minor literature and minor translation alongside the concepts of Colonial Mimicry and Imitation, as defined by Homi Bhabha. In this paper, I propose three different models of translation; Subversive translation, interpretive-cultural translation, and dissonant translation. Some translators took on an active role of content change agents compared to others who chose to preserve the Zionist ideology in the translated text as a certain faithfulness to the original text.
Discipline
Literature
Geographic Area
Israel
Sub Area
None