Translating Popular-Cultural Specificity in the Postcolonial Novel: A Corpus-Based Reappraisal of Mouloud Feraoun’s ‘Le Fils du Pauvre’ and Nisrin Shukri’s Ibn al-Faqir

Abstract

This article investigates the French–Arabic translation of popular-cultural specificity in
Mouloud Feraoun’s Le Fils du Pauvre (1954) and Nisrin Shukri’s Arabic translation Ibn
al-Faqir (2014). “Popular” is used here not as a synonym for commercially formulaic
fiction, but to designate a novelistic poetics grounded in the everyday lifeworld, oral
memory, material culture, kinship, customary institutions, and vernacular knowledge of
a rural Kabyle community. The study undertakes a secondary corpus reanalysis of the 38
source-culture lexical types and 64 target-text translation events identified by Zitouni
and Almutairi (2022), supplementing their etymological account with a functional
model informed by Aixela’s culture-specific items, Berman’s ethics of foreignness,
postcolonial heterolingualism, and narrative analysis. The corpus comprises Kabyle
items, items shared by Kabyle and Algerian Arabic, and Arabic-derived words
refunctionalised in French. Quantitative evidence shows that literal translation accounts
for 50% of recorded solutions, borrowing for 29.68%, mistranslation for 12.5%,
superordinate terms for 6.25%, and adaptation for 1.56%. Close analysis of akoufi,
karouba, chouari, fouta, gandoura, djema/tajmaʿt, amin, marabout, roumi, and taleb
demonstrates that denotational approximation frequently coexists with cultural
attenuation. The article proposes the “cultural-return paradox”: when a French text
returns Arabic-origin words to Modern Standard Arabic, graphic familiarity may conceal
semantic change, Algerian vernacular history, and Kabyle institutional meaning. It
argues that successful translation requires layered restitution rather than automatic
domestication: calibrated retention, concise contextual glossing, consistency, and
paratextual support. The findings reposition the translator as an ethnographic and
postcolonial mediator and offer a replicable framework for studying culturally dense
Maghrebi fiction across French and Arabic.