American expatriate translations and cultural negotiation: a Newmark-based approach to Moroccan literature and contact zone dynamics in Bowles’s For Bread Alone

Cultural negotiation has always been associated by mainstream academia with literature, film, and media; however, recent academic trends have taken translated texts as a medium for narrating nations and negotiating cultures. This paper explores negotiation as a characteristic of the translation process. Tangier is characterized by elements that make it a subject matter for translators, leading the city’s conversion into a contact zone where intercultural chronicles have occurred, most importantly, cultural translation. This paper focuses on Moroccan-translated literature by American expatriates between the 1950s and 1980s and takes Paul Bowles’s For Bread Alone (1972/1982) as a case study. This study adopts Newmark’s taxonomy of translation procedures as a theoretical framework. The findings of this paper show that translator’s procedural selection, co-authorship, and socio-cultural dynamics of the contact zone influence the TT and accentuate the source text’s context as the nation’s representative and its story’s official narrator, altering the emphasis from the act of translating to translation as a discursive product. Furthermore, Bowles’s translation confirms cultural translation theories by producing a hybrid and resilient discourses that undermine the hegemony of classical translation theories advocating for domesticating the source texts.