Imagology in rendering Çalikuşu: A micro-level approach

Abstract

Drawing on the relationship between translation and imagology, the overarching aim of the present study is to explore the means through which translation serves as an image-building tool with ideological and cross-cultural implications. In doing this, this study descriptively examines the Turkish author Reşat Nuri Güntekin's novel Çalikuşu (1922/2014) and its translation into English entitled The Autobiography of a Turkish Girl (1949) by the British army general Sir Wyndham Deedes. The aim is to investigate Deedes' microlevel translation choices, and their contribution to the building of an image of Turkishness to be presented to the British audience. The aforementioned translation is deemed fruitful for such examination in that, as pointed out by Deedes (1951), it is the first Turkish novel to be translated into English. The examination particularly focuses on several categories, namely, proper names, code-switching and loanwords, addressing terms, idiomatic expression, and culture-specific references. Deedes furnishes the image of Turkishness in a hybrid text in which he emphasizes the geographic, ontological, and linguistic in-betweenness of the story. Consequently, this study establishes that a new hybridity constructed by the translator in the translated text, which encapsulates both the familiar and the alien, foregrounds the concept of translation as engagement rather than transfer or encounter, and paves the way for a liminal perspective instead of holding rigid domestication versus foreignization binarism. © Peter Lang GmbH Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften Berlin 2020. All rights reserved.