A Descriptive Analysis Of The Turkish Translations Of Agatha Christie’s Murder On The Orient Express Within The Framework Of Retranslation Hypothesis
Özet
Changes in the translation policy of a given culture, the changing nature of translational
norms, the emergence of a new generation, ideological reasons and marketing potentials
may cause a previously-translated text to be retranslated into the same target
language/culture. And this study aims to analyze the retranslations of Agatha Christie’s
Murder on the Orient Express into Turkish within the framework of the Retranslation
Hypothesis. Within this scope, a total of six retranslations published by five different
publishers, were examined.
For the purposes of the study, a systemic analysis was conducted to describe the
position of crime fiction in general and Agatha Christie in particular in Turkish literary
polysystem within the framework of Even-Zohar’s Polysystem Theory. This was
followed by a normative analysis carried out on the translational norms observed (or
overlooked) in the retranslations within the framework of Gideon Toury’s Descriptive
Translation Studies. The normative analysis focused on three pre-defined categories,
including the translations of references to Turkish society, people and culture;
translations of French words, phrases and sentences; and translations of proper names
and titles. In addition, omissions in target texs at sentence, paragraph and chapter level
were analyzed. The profiles of these retranslations were defined in terms of target and
source orientedness. To supplement the results of normative and systemic analysis of
the retranslations, a paratextual analysis was carried out to determine how the
retranslations and reprints of the book were presented to the audience, which is thought
to influence the reception of the book by Turkish audience.
