Analysis of Culture-Specific Items in the English Translation of Nazım Hikmet’s Memleketimden İnsan Manzaraları

Abstract

Literary pieces reflect the social and cultural aspects of a society and culture-specific items (CSIs) play a key role in reflecting the cultural setting in these texts which may be sometimes heavily loaded with culture-bound knowledge unknown to members of other cultures. Therefore, literary translation is a way of cross-cultural communication as it introduces all or part of a particular culture to readers from different cultures. The aim of this study is to explore the use of foreignization and domestication strategies in the transfer of CSIs in the English translation of Nazım Hikmet’s Memleketimden İnsan Manzaraları based on Lawrence Venuti’s (1995) translation approach. To this end, the study comparatively analyzes Memleketimden İnsan Manzaraları (Hikmet, 2013) and its English translation entitled Human Landscapes from My Country (Hikmet, 2002) translated by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk. The study firstly identifies the microstrategies used by the translators in the transfer of CSIs into English based on the taxonomy of translation procedures proposed by Eirlys E. Davies (2003). It later reveals which macrostrategy proposed by Venuti (1995) (i.e. foreignization and domestication) has been predominantly employed by means of the relevant microstrategies. It finally discusses possible reasons and motives underlying the choices and decisions of the translators. As a result, the study finds out that the total number of foreignized items (262) outnumbers that of domesticated items (52) with a great difference and thus foreignizing translation strategy has been predominantly used in the transfer of CSIs into English. Although the translators have domesticated a considerable number of CSIs in the target text in order to reflect the associative meanings of the source-text items for the target readers to comprehend the relevant implications of the source text, they have predominantly adopted foreignizing translation by keeping CSIs almost unchanged in the TT. Thus, the otherness of the Turkish culture has been recreated in the English translation of Memleketimden İnsan Manzaraları.