An Etymological and Lexicological Study of Borrowings into Modern Standard Arabic (MSA): The Case of Nesrin Chukri’s translation of Mouloud Feraoun’s Le Fils du pauvre

Abstract

This study is based on a broad research question: How does the translation into Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) capture and convey the meanings embedded within languages belonging both inside and outside the sphere of the Arab world? To answer this question, a translation and literary study of borrowings, combining the methods of etymology and lexicology with in-depth content analysis and close reading, involving Nesrin Chukri’s translation of Mouloud Feraoun’s Le Fils du pauvre (The Poor Man’s Son, 1950/1954) into MSA, was carried out. Feraoun’s text hybridizes the French language by borrowings from many languages: Algerian Arabic, Kabyle and Old Arabic. The loan words, collected for the purpose of this study, offer relevant study examples to throw the light on MSA handling of vocabulary, which this study sought to understand. The analysis of Chukri’s translation of Feraoun’s loan words belonging to three languages (Algerian Arabic, Kabyle and Old Arabic) suggests that the translator does not favor newness; most of the time, Feraoun domesticated the Kabyle and Algerian Arabic loan vocabulary found in the source text, and systematically reinjected Old Arabic vocabulary. This practice poses the problem of the referentiality of MSA and its capacity to convey ethnic cultures, in our case Algerian Arabic and Kabyle. However, for this conclusion to be confirmed, larger, corpus-based translation studies extended to other Algerian francophone novels and also to the languages of other non-Arab ethnicities belonging to the Arab world are needed.