A Comparative Study of the Two English Translations of Orhan Pamuk's Kara Kitap from Berman's Stylistic Perspective

Abstract

Style is a constitution of conscious or unconscious choice of langugae set by the writer in a specific literary work. It has certain unique characteristics that reflect the witer’s intentions and it is closely related to translation studies. When the peculiar style of a writer needs to be translated, the target text should preserve the unique stylistic characteristics belonging to the source text writer and culture. As it is a rather challenging task, certain deformations may occur during the translation process. This study aims at exploring whether the stylistic features of Orhan Pamuk’s Kara Kitap which has been selected as the source text is kept in the two English translations of the novel translated by Güneli Gün (1994) and Maureen Freely (2006) which are the target texts of the study. A comparative stylistic analysis has been conducted in the light of Antoine Berman’s Analytic of Translation and his twelve deforming tendencies that are introduced within the analytic. Berman’s analytic has been taken as the main methodological framework of the study, and to complete the analysis in a more detailed way, five examples have been chosen from the source and target texts. At the end of the analysis, it has been found out that although the deforming tendencies have been observed in both target texts, in Freely’s translation, the source text seems to be more deformed as a result of the frequent use of deforming tendencies and the adopted target-oriented strategey. On the other hand, Gün’s translation has appeared to be more faithful to the original with fewer deforming tendencies in number resulting from the chosen source-oriented strategy.