A Comparative Study on the Paratextual Elements ın the Translations of Edgar Allan Poe’s Short Story Compilations

Abstract

As a common value belonging to humanity, cultural heritage is obtained by local attainments and literature paves the way for individuals to share them, to exchange information, in brief, to interact universally. Therefore, literary texts are formed by both authors’ personal experiences in their own worlds and readers’ interpretation. Because interpretation or hermeneutics is subjective and multivariate, a literary text is rewritten each time it is read by different readers although authors and readers are of the same culture and language. Literary translation, on the other hand, may bear linguistic, cultural and spatial differences if not temporal. This might bring distinctive challenges since these differences make comprehension troublesome. In such cases translators as the primary reader of the source text can come up with paratextual solutions. In this study, the two Turkish translations of the collected short fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, one of the well-known poets and short story writers of American literature, are examined comparatively in terms of the paratextual elements, especially annotations used by their two different translators. Stories with the highest number of notes are evaluated to shed light on the translator’s decisions and the possible reasons or results of them. Translations are evaluated within the context of Lawrence Venuti's foreignization and domestication strategies and Gerard Genette's paratext concept. It is thought to have come across not only the presence of publishing houses but also the translator’s voice and identity in the paratextual elements of the target texts.