Translation of Tennesse Williams’s The Night of the Iguana as a Novel and as a Play: A Descriptive Study

Abstract

The aim of this study is to explore translation of theatre texts through a comparative analysis of two Turkish translations of the play The Night of the Iguana (1961) by Tennessee Williams: İguananın Gecesi (1990) translated by Ülker İnce as a play and İguana Gecesi (1966) translated by Canset Unan as a novel, both of which are interlingual translations. What makes the case of the two Turkish translations under scrutiny unique is that while İnce’s translation is an intragenre translation, Unan’s translation is an intergenre translation. In the study, both target texts have been analyzed in terms of the strategies employed by the translators with a focus on additions, omissions and transformation of tense. The results of the analysis discussed in the light of Skopos Theory have revealed that the main source of difference between the translation strategies deployed by the two translators is the shift of genre. Thus, it is argued that the different strategies used in the translations might be explained on the basis of the two different skopoi as manifest in the translation strategies examined. It is further claimed that the case illustrates how agents of translation might take the liberty of specifying their own translation skopos under the shaping influence of socio-historical, cultural and even economic circumstances of the target literary system.

Keywords

• theatre translation,intragenre translation,intergenre translation,Tennessee Williams,The Night of the Iguana

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