RAISING AWARENESS ON INTERCULTURAL LITERATURE BY MIGRANT WOMEN THROUGH TRANSLATION

Abstract

The so-called migrant or intercultural literature has been consolidated in the last 70 years especially in Europe (Chiellino, 2015; Neelsen, 2018). It comprises the works by migrant writers publishing in the language and the country of destination. Therefore, they present a series of transnational and intercultural features both from the point of view of motives and of language. Inside this movement, literature written by migrant women is notably understudied and barely translated into Spanish (Quijada, 2019), despite the interest of a gender approach in the broader field of migration (Von Flotow, 2000). In order to bridge this gap, the present work aims to disseminate the novels of migrant women in English, French and German and to apply these to teaching translation from an intercultural and gender approach. The research method is based on translation and contrastive analysis, as well as the discovery of the authors through interviews and statements by the students of Literary Translation taught at the B.A. Translation and Interpreting at the Universidad de Córdoba. As a case study, we present a didactic proposal for the novel Kiffe kiffe demain by Faïza Guène (2004), a French woman writer of Algerian origin. Initial activities include real-life statements about cultural diversity given by women writers and journalists, a reflection on the search of the own identity and the stances taken by female protagonists in contemporary works written by second-generation authors, as well as the double segregation of French women of Maghrebi origin due to their role as women and to their African background. Furthermore, we propose the translation of selected chapters of the novel into Spanish in order to facilitate the understanding of hybridity and multiculturality as expressed in a linguistic combination of slang, Arabic borrowings and the register of the suburbs. The revised translations and the opinions expressed by students in two Moodle forums demonstrate that translation enhances awareness raising about the feelings of this migrant community, helping to understand their condition as a minority and moving their claims to new spaces and cultures.