Research Article

IDENTIFICATION OF MORPHOLOGICAL, LEXICAL, AND SYNTACTICAL OBFUSCATING ELEMENTS IN PSEUDO-RETRANSLATIONS

Number: Çeviribilim Özel Sayısı April 22, 2020
TR EN

IDENTIFICATION OF MORPHOLOGICAL, LEXICAL, AND SYNTACTICAL OBFUSCATING ELEMENTS IN PSEUDO-RETRANSLATIONS

Abstract

Scholars opt for several ways to avail themselves of previous studies produced in a foreign language as they author in their native tongues. Among these ways is translation rendered either by authors themselves or commissioned translators. The author of this paper observed another strategy adopted by Turkish scholars, i.e. pseudo-retranslation as an act and product, which can be defined as an academic author’s partial or complete presentation of another author’s translation as a retranslation of (a portion of) the original work. Although this definition is similar to plagiarized translation (Turell, 2004; Şahin, Duman, Gürses, Kaleş, and Woolls, 2019; Şahin, Duman, and Gürses, 2015), translational plagiarism (Gürses, 2011), translation plagiarism (Taş, 2019; Parlak, 2008; Leighton, 1994), the author refrained from defaulting to one of these terms and thus coined a novel term, pseudo-retranslation, because the author did not wish to discuss the unethicality/ethicality of this act and present it as a misconduct but as a strategy of academic textual production by avoiding the confused and confusing terminological profusion. For the purpose of the study, he employed a software program, WCopyFind, to identify intertextual similarities and to harvest qualitative and quantitative data. By doing so, the present study is intended to analyze the pseudo-retranslations by Turkish academic authors to reveal morphological, lexical, and syntactical elements obfuscating the tie between their pseudo-retranslations (in Turkish) and the source translation (in Turkish). The corpus consists of one non-academic and 15 academic works, i.e. seven articles, five master’s theses, two dissertations, and one book. Only the works containing “Drmrod” and “Dromrod”, misspellings of (Jeanne Ellis) Ormrod, and incorporating her six-item list of metacognitive skills in Turkish were included in the study. These two common misreferences are operationalized as initial indicators of pseudo-retranslations. The results revealed that Kalafat (2004) was the first to translate Ormrod’s six-item list into Turkish and to introduce the misspelt “Drmrod” and the other 15 translations(!) were its pseudo-retranslations. The results also showed that the authors had recourse to partial or complete pseudo-retranslations, the 14 pseudo-retranslations incorporated textual properties obfuscating the source translation, and WCopyFind was not competent enough to detect Turkish intertextual similarities owing to the obfuscating properties in the pseudo-retranslations. Keywords: obfuscation, pseudo-retranslation, academic works, intertranslational similarity,

Keywords

Thanks

I would like to express my gratitude to the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the University of Texas at Austin for hosting me as a visiting scholar and providing me with the materials and the setting that allowed me to conduct my post-doctoral research "Patient Zero: Pseudo-retranslation in Academic Papers".

References

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  5. Bloomfield, Lou. (Accessed: 11.06.2019), “WCopyfind”, https://plagiarism.bloomfieldmedia.com/software/wcopyfind/.
  6. Brumfiel, Geoff (2007). Turkish physicists face accusations of plagiarism. Nature, V.449, p. 8.
  7. Danilova, Vera (2013). Cross-Language Plagiarism Detection Methods. Proceedings of the Student Research Workshop Associated with RANLP 2013, Hissar: Bulgaria, pp. 51–57,
  8. Değirmenci, Tuğçe (2018). İlköğretim 4. sınıf Türkçe, matematik, fen bilimleri, sosyal bilgiler öğretim programlarının üstbilişsel açıdan incelenmesi. Unpublished master’s thesis, İstanbul: İstanbul Aydın Üniversitesi.

Details

Primary Language

English

Subjects

-

Journal Section

Research Article

Publication Date

April 22, 2020

Submission Date

January 9, 2020

Acceptance Date

March 10, 2020

Published in Issue

Year 2020 Number: Çeviribilim Özel Sayısı

APA
Yıldız, M. (2020). IDENTIFICATION OF MORPHOLOGICAL, LEXICAL, AND SYNTACTICAL OBFUSCATING ELEMENTS IN PSEUDO-RETRANSLATIONS. Amasya Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, Çeviribilim Özel Sayısı, 131-161. https://izlik.org/JA79GL35NX
AMA
1.Yıldız M. IDENTIFICATION OF MORPHOLOGICAL, LEXICAL, AND SYNTACTICAL OBFUSCATING ELEMENTS IN PSEUDO-RETRANSLATIONS. Amasya University Journal of Social Sciences. 2020;(Çeviribilim Özel Sayısı):131-161. https://izlik.org/JA79GL35NX
Chicago
Yıldız, Mehmet. 2020. “IDENTIFICATION OF MORPHOLOGICAL, LEXICAL, AND SYNTACTICAL OBFUSCATING ELEMENTS IN PSEUDO-RETRANSLATIONS”. Amasya Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, no. Çeviribilim Özel Sayısı: 131-61. https://izlik.org/JA79GL35NX.
EndNote
Yıldız M (April 1, 2020) IDENTIFICATION OF MORPHOLOGICAL, LEXICAL, AND SYNTACTICAL OBFUSCATING ELEMENTS IN PSEUDO-RETRANSLATIONS. Amasya Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi Çeviribilim Özel Sayısı 131–161.
IEEE
[1]M. Yıldız, “IDENTIFICATION OF MORPHOLOGICAL, LEXICAL, AND SYNTACTICAL OBFUSCATING ELEMENTS IN PSEUDO-RETRANSLATIONS”, Amasya University Journal of Social Sciences, no. Çeviribilim Özel Sayısı, pp. 131–161, Apr. 2020, [Online]. Available: https://izlik.org/JA79GL35NX
ISNAD
Yıldız, Mehmet. “IDENTIFICATION OF MORPHOLOGICAL, LEXICAL, AND SYNTACTICAL OBFUSCATING ELEMENTS IN PSEUDO-RETRANSLATIONS”. Amasya Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi. Çeviribilim Özel Sayısı (April 1, 2020): 131-161. https://izlik.org/JA79GL35NX.
JAMA
1.Yıldız M. IDENTIFICATION OF MORPHOLOGICAL, LEXICAL, AND SYNTACTICAL OBFUSCATING ELEMENTS IN PSEUDO-RETRANSLATIONS. Amasya University Journal of Social Sciences. 2020;:131–161.
MLA
Yıldız, Mehmet. “IDENTIFICATION OF MORPHOLOGICAL, LEXICAL, AND SYNTACTICAL OBFUSCATING ELEMENTS IN PSEUDO-RETRANSLATIONS”. Amasya Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, no. Çeviribilim Özel Sayısı, Apr. 2020, pp. 131-6, https://izlik.org/JA79GL35NX.
Vancouver
1.Mehmet Yıldız. IDENTIFICATION OF MORPHOLOGICAL, LEXICAL, AND SYNTACTICAL OBFUSCATING ELEMENTS IN PSEUDO-RETRANSLATIONS. Amasya University Journal of Social Sciences [Internet]. 2020 Apr. 1;(Çeviribilim Özel Sayısı):131-6. Available from: https://izlik.org/JA79GL35NX