Traduire l’hybridité linguistique marocaine : plurilinguisme et identités dans la traduction italienne de Fouad Laroui

This article examines the Italian translation of Fouad Laroui’s novel Le jour où Malika ne s’est pas mariée as a laboratory for translating Moroccan linguistic hybridity. Situated against the complex plurilingual landscape of Morocco and Laroui’s own double cultural belonging, the study focuses on how Cristina Vezzaro’s L’esteta radicale reconfigures the relations of power between Arabic, French, English, Latin and other contact languages. Adopting a microtextual, contrastive approach, it analyses a corpus of dialogic excerpts rich in heterolingual items, sociolectal features and intertextual echoes, considering both textual and paratextual strategies (glosses, notes, glossary). The discussion shows how recurrent procedures – maintenance, substitution by more familiar loans, neutralisation, and paratextual explicitation – produce a “third space” that mediates between Moroccan and Italian contexts of reception. The study argues that these choices are never merely technical, but reshape symbolic hierarchies between languages and modulate the visibility of Moroccan plurilingualism. Ultimately, the Italian translation emerges as an intercultural mediator that both preserves and redistributes Laroui’s negotiation of identity, illustrating how literary translation in a postcolonial, plurilingual setting becomes a privileged site for rethinking authorship, readership and linguistic belonging in contemporary translingual Francophone Moroccan literature.