A Relevance Theoretic Perspective On The Translation Of Culture-Specific Religious Items: An Analysis Of The English Translation Of Latife Tekins's Sevgili Arsız Ölüm And İskender Pala's Katre_i Matem

Abstract

The role of culture is undeniable in translation studies. Culture-specific items pose a great challenge for the translator in many cases because culture is a very extensive concept, and it encompasses beliefs, traditions, customs, perceptions, religion, a way of life, and a way of thinking. Since culture-specific items are different in each culture, translators need to pay attention to their translations in order to transmit the message produced by the source-text author. This study aims at analyzing the culture-specific items in Latife Tekin’s Sevgili Arsız Ölüm (2013), which is translated by Saliha Paker and Mel Kenne in 2008, and İskender Pala’s Katre-i Matem (2009), which is translated by Ruth Whitehouse in 2014, focusing on the translation strategies proposed by Javier Franco Aixelá (1996) within the framework of a relevance-theoretic approach to translation which is proposed by Ernest August Gutt (1991). The translation strategies proposed by Aixelá will be used as the micro strategies, and Gutt’s direct and indirect translation concepts will be used as the macro strategies in this thesis. This study focuses on the relevance-theoretic perspective on the translation of culture-specific items since the contextual effects of the culture-specific items and the strategies used by the translators to convey those contextual effects can be dealt within the framework of relevance theory, which is a context-based theory that explains the creation of a context through the presence of certain clues (that is, ostensive stimuli) such as culture-specific items. This study also aims at illustrating how the context of a target text may differ from the context of its source text in direct translation and in indirect translation.