Recreation of Culture Specific Items in the English Translation of Latife Tekin’s Berci Kristin Çöp Masalları

Abstract

As a well-known author from Turkey, Latife Tekin focuses on daily lives of urbanized or urbanizing communities smashed under the wheels of capitalism, and narrates the imperfect lives and broken memoirs of the ordinary people by re-contextualizing the Anatolian poems, folkloric songs, traditional sayings and idioms into her works. This paper aims to find the relations between source and target cultures with a comparison of culture specific items in the Turkish and English versions of Berci Kristin Çöp Masalları (Berji Kristin, Tales from the Garbage Hills). The first part of this paper focuses on Latife Tekin as a novelist, the themes she uses in her works and her position as a figure of Turkish literature. The second part briefly discusses the novel Berji Kristin Tales from the Garbage Hills in terms of the characters and themes and their effects on the narrative structure of the novel. In the third part, translational decisions peculiar to the culture specific items are debated with references to the theoretical framework drawn by Javier Franco Aixela. After all the comparative analyses, one happens to find out that there are several differences in the English translation of the novel with regards to the recreation of literary elements which already exist in the source culture, and that the perspective of the translators, who adopted various translation strategies to overcome these differences in the process of translation, bears traces of the translational approach put forward by Aixela for the analysis of culture specific items in translation. 

Keywords

• Literary translation,modern Turkish literature,culture specific items,translation strategies,Javier Franco Aixela

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