Analysis Of Idioms And Culture Specific Items in The English Translation Of Yaşar Kemal’s Ince Memed

Abstract

Since the first appearance of humanity, culture has been created and transferred to the next generation and to the other people’s cultures through art, speech, writing, music, literature and many other means. The most frequently referred method, for this kind of intercultural transference from culture to culture, is translation. While conducting translation and performing intercultural transfer, interaction of two cultures with different powers and the consequences of this interaction are studied firstly by Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher in 19th century and then in 1990’s by Lawrence Venuti in his book Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. In this context, when translating from relatively less powerful cultures to more dominant cultures; destruction or eradication of cultural items of less powerful culture for the sake of dominant culture’s reader’s admiration make the less powerful culture further powerless and invisible. Venuti calls this kind of translations as “Domestication” and in response to this he states translator should adapt “Foreignization” and make the less powerful culture become visible. In this study, the novel of Ince Memed by Yaşar Kemal in 1955 is tried to be explained in the light of Domestication and Foreignization concepts of Venuti. For the purpose of detecting the tendency in the translation of the novel; translation of Culture Specific Items and Idioms are scrutinized. Within this context, Culture Specific Items are analysed in the light of Javier Franco Aixela’s classification of translation methods suggested in his article dated 1996, while Idioms are examined in the light of Mona Baker’s categorization of translation methods suggested for translation of idioms in her book titled In Other Words in 1992. As a result of these examinations in Ince Memed’s translation by Edouard Roditi, it is determined both whether Turkish culture is preserved or not in the process of translation into Anglo-American culture, and how much of the novel’s extent is preserved.