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Transparent foreignization

Leila Aboulela’s literary practice in The Translator

 | KU LeuvenLeuven
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Abstract
This article revisits Leila Aboulela’s The Translator (1999) through its engagement with multilingualism and cultural translation. As a novel of migration, it explores the protagonist Sammar’s journey between Sudan and Scotland, navigating the field of cultural and linguistic identity amid the hegemony of English. Her relationship with Rae, a Scottish professor, highlights the tensions of cultural negotiation shaped by language and faith. I argue that Aboulela’s poetics disrupts monolingualism through multilingual strategies of foreignization, creatively employing English to signal linguistic plurality. Reading The Translator as a “born-translated” novel, I examine how it problematizes cultural negotiation and reflects new social formations that transcend ethnic and geographic boundaries. Aboulela’s work maps new affective paths through language, offering a model for reimagining identity beyond the constraints of (hegemonic) monolingualism.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Reading The Translator through the lens of translation studies
  • 3.Translating culture beyond language
  • 4.Literary heteroglossia and the language of imperialism
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Author queries
  • References
References (33)
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