Translating Cultural Items Pertaining to African-American Culture: Three Turkish Translations of Hughes’ Merry-Go-Round

Abstract

This study focuses on the translation of cultural items specific to African-American culture through the case of three Turkish translations of Langston Hughes’ poem ‘Merry-Go-Round’ by Necati Cumalı (1961), Özcan Özbilge (1985) and Cevat Çapan (1988). Drawing on Newmark’s (1988) and Vlahov and Florin’s (1969) categorizations of cultural items and Kansu-Yetkiner et al.’s (2018) classification of translation strategies for cultural items, the study analyzes source text and target text cultural items descriptively and comparatively. By doing so, the study seeks to determine whether the translators opt for domestication or foreignization in translating items specific to African-American culture into Turkish. The findings are examined along with paratextual elements from the books which feature the three translations to establish justifications for translators’ tendency towards domestication or foreignization. In conclusion, it is argued that regardless of their tendencies, the translators’ strategies cannot be completely placed at one end of an axis of domestication and foreignization but they are somewhere in-between due to different considerations such as stylistic and cultural norms of the source and target cultures.