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

Year 2018, Volume: 4 Issue: 2, 588 - 603, 29.12.2018

Fatih İkiz Göksenin Abdal

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

References

• Aixela, J F, (1996). “Culture-Specific Items in Translation.” In R. Alvarez & M. Carmen Africa Vidal (Ed.), Translation, Power, Subversion,). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 52-78.
• Aydın, S. (2008). “Sevgili Arsız Ölüm’ün Olağanüstü Gerçek Korkuları.” Millî Folklor [National Folklore], 20/79 : 90-93.
• Balık, M. (2013). “Çevreci Eleştiri Işığında Latife Tekin'in Romanları.” Çevrimiçi Tematik Türkoloji Dergisi [Online Thematic Journal of Turkic Studies], 1: 1-16.
• Basnett, S. (1998). Translation Studies. London, the UK: Routledge.
• Bassnett, S., Lefevere, A. (1992). Translation/History/Culture: A Sourcebook. New York, ABD: Routledge.
• Bassnett-McGuire, S. (2002). Translation Studies. New York: Taylor & Francis.
• Catford, J C. (1965). A Linguistic Theory of Translation: An Essay in Applied Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Chesterman, A., Arrojo, R. (2000). “Shared Ground in Translation Studies,” Target 12 (1): 151–60.
• Jakobson, R. (1959). “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation,” On Translation, edited by Reuben Brower, Harvard, Massachusetts, ABD: Harvard University Press, 232-39.
• Munday, J. (2001). Introducing Translation Studies: Theories and Applications. Oxon: Routledge.
• Nida, E. (1969). The Theory and Practice of Translation. Boston, USA: Brill.
• Pym, A. (1998). Method in Translation History. New York, USA: St. Jerome Publishing.
• Robinson, D. (1997). Translation and Empire: Postcolonial Approaches Explained. Manchester: St. Jerome.
• Schleiermacher, F. (1813/2012). “On the Different Methods of Translating”, Çev. Susan Bernofsky, The Translation’s Studies Reader, 2. bs. Ed. Lawrence Venuti, Londra & New York: Routledge, 43-63.
• Schulte, R., Biguenet, J. (1992). Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida. Chicago & London: The University Press of Chicago.
• Snell-Hornby, M. (2006). The Turns of Translation Studies: New Paradigms or Shifting Viewpoints?. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
• Tahir-Gürçağlar, Ş. (2011). Çevirinin ABC’si. İstanbul: Say Yayınları.
• Tekin, L. (1984). Berci Kristin Çöp Masalları. İstanbul: Adam Yayıncılık.
• Tekin, L. (2000). Berji Kristin: Tales from the Garbage Hills (Trans. Saliha Paker, Ruth Christie). London, the UK: Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd.
• Tiken, S. (2015). “Latife Tekin Romanlarında Arketipsel Bir Motif: Yükseliş Deneyimi.” Uluslararası Sosyal Araştırmalar Dergisi [The Journal of International Social Research], 8/40: 150-157.
• Tymoczko, M., Gentzler, E. (2002). Translation and Power, Boston: University of Massachusetts Press.
• Venuti, L. (1995). The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. Londra & New York: Routledge.
• Yazıcı, M. (2005). Çeviribilimin Temel Kavram ve Kuramları. İstanbul: Multilingual.