Challenges and Solutions to Translating Multilingual Literary Texts between Identity Custody and Translators’ Creativity: The case of Farah CHAMMA’s Poem Translation ‘I Am No Palestinian’

Abstract

In the modern world, Globalization, Colonialism, Technology, Politics and Economy have changed many cultural identities and contributed to the appearance of multilingual literature. Code-Switching could occur in different institutional languages, slangs, dialects, and sociolects; so, translators should find strategies to tackle this literary phenomenon and preserve the source text identity. But how could the translator (who is a reader and a transmitter at the same time) deal with these types of literary texts? And how could he/she produce a target multilingual text that preserves the identity and the magic expressed in the source text? The multilingual text is a specific genre of literature which combines two or more languages in the desire to express a multilingual and multicultural reality inherent to a particular group of individuals. Multilingual Literature appeared for the first time during the Middle Ages, but it was called originally Macaronic literature. The term 'Macaronic' is commonly used to indicate any hybrid language that mixes the vernacular with Latin. This mixture was frequent during the Middle Ages in all romance literature. Macaronic literature is therefore a phenomenon that represents the cultivated, highly educated and sophisticated categories of society like academics, novelists and poets. However, translators who used to identify the translation as an inter-linguistic transfer between two formal systems (source and target institutional languages) have faced obstacles in working with multilingual texts in which the author uses code-switching as an alternative to reflect the unfair categorization of people and registers in modern societies). This paper aims to examine the different strategies proposed by Venuti, Cincotta, Bojanin, Qoates and other scholars to transfer the code-switching device in the literary texts; and eventually proposes an integrated strategy that will preserve the code-switching aspect in the translation process, namely in Farah CHAMMA’s poem ‘I am No Palestinian’. Our strategy aims at creating such equilibrium between the translator’s creativity and identity losses, which will allow the target reader to be an active participant in the understanding process and revealing the otherness of the source text. The poem of Farah CHAMMA is chosen as a case study in this research, because it reflects the human being struggle for independence and freedom. However, the independence in this context does not mean the liberation from the colonizer who enters with his armed forces and military weapons to your country, the colonizer nowadays enters your brain trough globalization, migration, media, internet, and all these factors contributed to the fusion of the traditional notion of identities. The Islamic Arabic identity is contaminated by the French, English, Spanish, German, Italian, Christian and Jewish identities due to this kind of colonialism which destroys all the identity and patriotism fundamentals such as: ethics, religion, thought, and of course language. This is why Farrah writes in her poem that she had lost her language and all the Arabic Palestinian identity that comes with, she masters many foreign languages but her mother tongue. She thinks, acts and does like the British, the French, The Portuguese poets and artists do, but she just knows little tales about the Palestinian poet Ziad RAFFIF who defends the Palestinian issue in his literary works. So, the poet Farah Chamma used the multilingualism in her poetry to draw a picture of the struggle that exists within herself, and to show us how a language can embody an identity with all its features. The multiplicity of identities may create a new identity for the writer of the source text. Thus, the translator will not deal anymore with all the different cultures that belong to the languages of the text, but he must instead, discover the new identity of this community that uses this kind of speech system i.e., the Code-Switching system.