Dynamic Engagement with Gender and Culture: Transcreating Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birth-Mark”

Abstract

This thesis is a transcreation from English into Arabic of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “The Birth-Mark” along with a critical commentary. It is an endeavor to advocate for gender equality and emphasize the powerful role of translators as agents of social change. By applying a set of motivated interventions, it calls for the use of a dynamic engagement approach with gender and culture. In doing so, it departs from a categorical approach to engagement that has informed Translation Studies since the cultural turn; a theorization that has over-simplified translators’ strategies as either domesticating or foreignizing texts, cultures and languages. Dynamic engagement is an empowering approach which gives me the necessary freedom to engage in multiple ways with the source text and to produce a translation and a recreation (trans-creation) of a feminist short story aimed for an Arab readership. In fact, I not only translate Hawthorne’s feminist allegory, I also recreate it by linking the status of women to the status of the translator, both at the level of the text (through the insertion of a translator in fabula) and at the level of the commentary (through discussing how strategies at the level of the narrative intersect with theorization of feminist and activist translation)._x000D_ _x000D_ Keywords: Dynamic Engagement, Transcreation, Feminist Translation, Literary Activism, Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Birth-Mark”

Date of Award	2018
Original language	American English
Awarding Institution	HBKU College of Humanities and Social Science