ABSTRACT
A frequent theme in postcolonial translation studies is the notion that it is the “first-world translator” who wields the power to shape the “thirdworld text.” Rajaa Alsanea’s Girls of Riyadh , an ostensibly “third-world text” published by Penguin, however, differs in thoroughly consistent ways from the translation that I, the sole and ostensibly “first-world translator” submitted for publication. The fact that the “author-publisher” has been able to dismiss my reading of the text and replace it with theirs challenges this oft taken-for-granted notion and problematizes the process of translation in which my role in the production of the English text was not only rejected by author and publisher but also minimized by the author’s public statements. Between the presence of my name as “co-translator” on the title page, its absence in the acknowledgments, and Alsanea’s invocation of me as a desultory editor of her English lies a story of text circulation and commodification that, I argue, is best understood when one considers the apparatus of publicity and public image-making along with the less visible process of actually producing the text of a translation. In this story, what is “lost” happens less in the process of translation than it does in the process of publishing.
