Ghazzi Alqussaibi's His Excellency, The Ambassador

Translators are literary ambassadors. They bring foreign works to the audience of the target language. During the past semester, I have been working to translate part one of His Excellency, The Ambassador, by Ghazzi AlQussaibi, for its popularity among Arab readers around the world. Some critics claim that the novel is actually a true story of an Arab politician. This is because the author was a renowned political figure for most of his life, where it would be within reason to assume he had a close friend of a similar character as that in the novel. Almost all of his literary works were centered on the life of politicians. When I started to translate this novel, I adopted Venuti’s strategy of foreignness and made sure the translation in English is fluent and accurate to the source as possible, in addition to tackling some linguistic, cultural, and political …show more content…
The author mentions this twice in the novel. In the first, the Prime Minister told his personal assistant, “there is a woman in every case.” After an extensive search to find out if Napoleon actually said it, I reached no evidence. I was either left to translate the quotation literally or find a French equivalent. This specific example became the greatest challenge in my translation, whereby I kept searching until determining a list of several choices. French phrases are both familiar to English readers and tend to make English texts look elegant, so I elected to use “cherchez la femme” instead of the literal meaning that would have been translated from Arabic to English directly. Surprisingly, the phrase came from the 1854 novel, The Mohicans of Paris, by Alexander Dumas. In the interests of ethics, I had to disregard its attribution to Napoleon Bonaparte, merely keeping it anonymous. I believe this is the best choice given the available information. It could simply have been a mistake on the part of the author, after