Hala Kamal (Ph.D.)
Professor of English and Gender Studies
Dept of English, Faculty of Arts, Cairo University, Orman 12613, Cairo, Egypt (email)
Virginia Woolf in Arabic: A feminist paratextual reading of translation strategies
- Citation:
- Kamal, H., "Virginia Woolf in Arabic: A feminist paratextual reading of translation strategies", The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and Contemporary Global Literature, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2021.
Abstract:
This chapter offers a feminist critique of the strategies used in translating Virginia Woolf’s work into Arabic. The study opens with a historical overview of Woolf’s works translated into Arabic since the 1960s, followed by a discussion of the critical approaches to the translated texts from a feminist perspective, with particular emphasis on the significance of a paratextual analysis. A whole section of the chapter is devoted to examining Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own as a case study of the translation of Woolf into Arabic. The chapter ends by highlighting the ethical dimensions embedded in the translation strategies related to Virginia Woolf and feminist texts in general. The study examines the representation of Woolf in Egypt and the Arab World, and points out the shift from emphasis on Woolf as a modernist novelist to a feminist writer.
Keywords: Virginia Woolf, translation, representation, feminist, modernist, paratexts, Arab World.