Badriah Albesher's Hend And The Soldier

Badriah Albesher is perhaps the most controversial contemporary woman writer in Saudi Arabia. She became popular in the last decade when she wrote a couple of stories about women’s struggles to find freedom in a country that sets rules against their own will driven by old cultural norms. Hend and the Soldiers is her first work that was recently translated by Sanna Dhahir, a Professor of English at Effat University in Saudi Arabia. Dhahir has translated several literary works from Arabic into English. She is also a woman activist who saw Albesher’s work groundbreaking that brings a rare woman’s voice in a patriarchal society and to the Anglophone readers. The story vividly explores sexuality in a very conservative society which made her work …show more content…
(curiosity and refusal. Said mostly by parents to their children)
These meanings, however, unfortunately cannot be found in contemporary Arabic dictionaries as they are mostly used in colloquial expressions rather than a written one. The translator here took it for granted that the reader understands these cultural expressions or perhaps she targeted American-Arab readers who know them by heart since most of them read the Quran. An Anglophone reader, however, has no clue of these cultural meanings in Arabic and the translator transliterated them in English with no footnotes to explain the difference in each meaning. Another error the translator slipped in is the shift of words from one passage to another. For example, the translator refers to supreme deity sometimes as Allah and at other times as God. Such shift causes confusion to the reader of whether she is talking about one or two gods. Same thing applies to Jinn (plural) and Jinni (singular) of the word Satan. The translator shifts between these words with no contextual explanation of them. The words Satan, Jinn, and Jinni are all used to refer to Satan. The translator should stick to one and avoid the confusion to the lured