Transparent foreignization

Leila Aboulela’s literary practice in The Translator

Bibliographic Data

ID22429706
AuthorsChiara Arcadio (KU Leuven, corresponding author)
Year2026
Publication date2026-04-10
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnglish Text Construction (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1874-8767 • E-ISSN: 1874-8775
PublisherJohn Benjamins Publishing Company (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1075/etc.25010.pir
OpenAlexW7153193199
LanguageEN
References cited13

This article revisits Leila Aboulela’s The Translator (1999) through its engagement with multilingualism and cultural translation. As a novel of migration, it explores the protagonist Sammar’s journey between Sudan and Scotland, navigating the field of cultural and linguistic identity amid the hegemony of English. Her relationship with Rae, a Scottish professor, highlights the tensions of cultural negotiation shaped by language and faith. I argue that Aboulela’s poetics disrupts monolingualism through multilingual strategies of foreignization, creatively employing English to signal linguistic plurality. Reading The Translator as a “born-translated” novel, I examine how it problematizes cultural negotiation and reflects new social formations that transcend ethnic and geographic boundaries. Aboulela’s work maps new affective paths through language, offering a model for reimagining identity beyond the constraints of (hegemonic) monolingualism.

Hegemony · Multilingualism · Negotiation · Poetics · Comparative and World Literature · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Translation Studies and Practices

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