The Little Prince in Algerian Arabic: a lexical perspective

The aim of this paper is the lexical analysis of the Arabic Algerian (AA) version of the novella Le petit prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, signed by Talbi and Brousse. In order to make the readers grasp the outstanding pioneering role of this work, I decided to put it in the context of the complex linguistic map of Algeria and the on-going battle for/against the so-called darija, in the ideological framework of the campaign of arabization, since independence to nowadays. Le petit prince, apart from its several versions into Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), was translated into the three main varieties of Maghrebi Arabic. Through the analysis of a collection of lexical data, I try to underline which strategies the translators used to re-write and renegotiate the source text (ST) in a totally different cultural context, by means of the intelligent domestication of idioms and figurative expressions. I discuss cases of translation choices that sometimes make the target text (TT) closer to a MSA register, rather than to AA, and search for ideological or mere stylistic justifications. It seems also useful to compare it with the Tunisian (TA) and the Moroccan (MA) ones, and sometimes with two MSA translations. Each of the Maghrebi versions shows that the so long despised darija has all of the elements that enable it to be a flexible language for a creative literature, and represents an important step towards the break-down of the traditional label stating that MSA is only written and not spoken, whereas darija is only spoken and not written.