Multilingual humour in a polyglot multicultural author: The case of Fouad Laroui

Abstract

This paper focuses primarily on the Dutch and Italian translations of Fouad Laroui's works, in which the two central features of his writing, i.e. humour and multilingualism, are strictly related. Laroui is a transcultural author fluent in French, English, Dutch, dialectal Arabic and classical Arabic, and his works reflect the different layers of experiences and languages he has gathered during his life. Humour, on the other hand, is a way for him to present, in an axiological opposition, different viewpoints that mostly cross cultures, nationalities and social hierarchies. Our analysis of Le Jour où Malika ne s'est pas mariée and Une année chez les Français has allowed us to pinpoint the interaction between the two main features of his writing and examine the creation of puns by means of different languages or loanwords. We have then analysed the various strategies adopted by translators and commented their different solutions. Our analysis has allowed us to identify three different ways in which a third language (L3) in the source text - often connected to humour - is rendered in the target text, i.e. (1) taken as it is, (2) distorted or adapted to the target language and (3) kept with an intertextual or paratextual element or replaced altogether.