Abstract
In our study entitled "Traduction de la ville sous le point de vue sémiotique : Istanbul à travers ses signes en trois langues" [Translation of the city from a semiotic point of view: Istanbul through its signs in three languages] which appeared in the book titled Défis et enjeux de la médiation interculturelle [Challenges and issues of intercultural mediation] published in 2012 by Peter Lang, we launched a new concept in translation studies: "watermark translation". "Watermark translation" would be an original text written directly in the native language of the context in which it is published, but it turns out that this language is not the original language of the context presented in the work. The text is therefore generated by a translation operation which is carried out in the mind of the author. So, like a watermark in a bank note, this psychic translation operation is woven into the text and leaves its mark on it; the readers would easily think that they were reading a translation and not an original work. The corpus which led us to conceive this new concept is constituted by a series of five thriller novels written by the English writer Jason Goodwin: Janissary Tree (1st volume; 2006), The Snake Stone (2nd volume ; 2007), The Bellini Card (3rd volume; 2008), An Evil Eye (4th volume; 2011) and The Baklava Club (5th volume; 2014). In this series, Goodwin invites his audience -the English-speaking Western world- to a fundamentally different world based on foreign coordinates and realities little known or unknown in the context of the production, which is the city of Istanbul at the end of the 19th century, capital of the Ottoman Empire. Goodwin has all the assets to produce the "watermark translation" requiring a deep knowledge of the foreign culture since he is a specialist in Byzantine history and Ottoman history. In this study, we will try to define "watermark translation" based on the examples from the books constituting our corpus.