A Descriptive Analysis Of The Turkish Translations Of Agatha Christie’s Murder On The Orient Express Within The Framework Of Retranslation Hypothesis

Abstract

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.