An Analysis of the English Translations of Erzurum Folk Riddles in the Light of Raymond Van Den Broeck’s Translation Criticism Model

Abstract

Translation criticism has been a field of interest of many scholars in recent years. However, it is observed that certain standards for translation criticism have not been set yet. The purpose of this thesis is to draw attention to the translations of riddles that were done in 1960s. In these years, a lot of riddles from various regions of Turkey were translated under the leadership of İlhan Başgöz and Andreas Tietze. These translations were published in the book entitled Bilmece: A Corpus of Turkish Riddles in 1973. Riddle translation had never been handled until that book. As it is not possible to include all of those riddles in this thesis, only the translations of Erzurum riddles were the focus of criticism. Within this respect, the criticism is based on the model of Raymond van den Broeck who is the first to have put forward some objective criteria for translation criticism and who aimed to set standards for this field.