The Misrepresentation of Iraqi Women’s Collective Identity in Translation:  A Text World Approach

Translation has the power to shape how identities are perceived and received across different cultures. This study explores how the collective identity of Iraqi women is altered in translation, leading to potential misrepresentations that differ from real-life stories and the original literary work. Particularly, the English translation of Hadiya Hussein’s novel ما سيأتي (2017) as Waiting for the Past (2022) by Barbara Romaine is compared to the original text and real-life narratives shared by Iraqi women at the Department of Translation, University of Basrah. The research employs Text World Theory (Werth 1999) to examine how collective identity, characterized by shared attributes, interests, and experiences, is distorted in translation. The findings unveil that the text and the discourse worlds of the translated text have been temporally shifted, affecting how English readers receive it. Instead of the original text’s hopeful anticipation of future change, the translated text presents a world filled with nostalgia, memory, introspection, loss, and an unfulfilled past. Additionally, the translator’s removal of the author’s signature, including the time and place of finishing the novel, erases the author’s personal connection and realistic portrayal of events.