Back and Forth: The Curious Case of the Translations of Halide Edib Adıvar’s The Clown and His Daughter

Abstract

This study explores the intertwined processes of translation that the novel The Clown and His Daughter (1935) by renown Turkish writer Halide Edib Adıvar (1882–1964) went through. The first version of the work, a story set in Turkey but written in English, will be reflected upon with Hongyin Wang’s concept of ‘foreign language creation’ (Tu and Li 2017). Halide Edib wrote Sinekli Bakkal (The fly-plagued grocer), the Turkish version of the work, in 1936 and this, in turn, will be tackled as a ‘textless back self-translation’ drawing on Wang’s ‘textless back translation’ (ibid.). The last translation process that the work went through was from its Turkish version back into English by W. D. Halsey with the title Sinekli Bakkal, or the Clown and His Daughter in two volumes, and this second English version will be problematized as a retranslation in English and an instance of ‘foreign language re-creation’ produced by the back translation of the textless back self-translation. This study aims to present a case study of a textless back self-translation to expand the concept of foreign language creation with foreign language re-creation and to unveil the tools used in the translation processes of the three versions in question comparatively. The study concludes that the reasons for the differences between the foreign language creation and re-creation of the work may be due to differences in translating oneself and translating others and to the intermediary Sinekli Bakkal that possesses the features of both self-translation and textless back translation.

Keywords

• textless back translation
• textless back self-translation
• foreign language creation
• foreign language re-creation
• Halide Edib

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