Translation as Ethnography: Translating Language, Identity and Space in Al Bagh by Bushra Khalfan

Long before being recognized, translation as a practice had played a central role in the field of anthropology, and in the work of ethnographers. This thesis studies and critically comments on translation in relation to ethnography by applying ethnographical methods in translating the first three chapters of Bushra Khalfan’s novel Al Bagh. It aims to use ethnography as a translation method to translate culture-specific items such as environment, customs and architecture by bringing together the trilogy of language, space and identity. I argue that since ethnographers are translators of their experiences, translators of culture can also be ethnographers. By using techniques such as transliteration, illustration and interview, the translator intends to take the liberties ethnographers have compared to translators in an attempt to bring the sense of culture and its orality represented in idiolects into translation, which is a form of assimilation into the work of ethnographers in fieldwork. This thesis is an attempt to test ethnography as framework to support the translation of an Arab culture for English readership, while maintaining the literary characteristics of the novel. Utilizing the complementary relationship between two disciplines— different on paper but similar in practice— opens new doors from which a literary translator can enter in dealing with the intricacies and challenges posed by literary translation. Target readers deserve the chance to travel through texts and be challenged both mentally and emotionally to accept different life experiences and thus demolish the pre-existing prejudices that may very well victimize them, challenging with that the concept of “otherness.”