Translating Intertextuality as Intercultural Communication: A Case Study

Intertextuality refers to the textual space where texts intersect and new (hyper)texts emerge. It is the shaping of a text’s meaning by other (inter)texts present in it. As a literary device taking forms like allusion, quotation, pastiche, translation, etc., it depends on the presupposition of the presence of intertexts (or hypotexts) in (hyper)texts and on the reader’s recognition of such presence. For the recognition of intertexts, authors usually rely on shared cultural knowledge with the reader. The presence of intertexts in a text can either open it to interpretations or direct the reader towards a one in particular. If such recognition can possibly be missed intraculturally, the possibility is doubled when the reading is intercultural, as in translation. To minimize the loss of the intertextual context of the source text (ST), translators adopt certain translation strategies (such as analogous intertexts, paratextual devices, and exegetical translation) that ensure such context is relayed into the target text (TT) and recognized by the target reader. While the semantic equivalence can neutralize the linguistic difference, relaying the intertextual relations in the ST remains the daunting problem encountered by the translator. I argue in this dissertation that intertexts, particularly Quranic references, in the Arabic novel are a source of semantic density and pose a considerable challenge to the translator. Since semantic equivalence alone does not guarantee that the ST intertextual relations are maintained in the TT, a synthesis of other translation strategies is required to relay the ST intertextual relation into the TT. Drawing on Kristeva’s (1986) ‘vertical intertextuality,’ Fairclough’s ‘manifest intertextuality’ (Momani et al., 2010), Derrida’s ‘iterability’ and ‘citationality’ (Alfaro, 1996), Bakhtin’s ‘reaccentuation’ or ‘double-voicing’ (Kristeva, 1986), I opted for paratextual devices to ensure that the TT reader will capture those relations. Bracketed explanations were used extremely economically to avoid producing an enlarged translation