Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar & Ahu Selin Erkul Yağcı

The figure of the translator in the Turkish novel: A troubled “intellectual”

The paper offers a comparative analysis of the translator as a central character in four early Turkish novels from the late 19th century and two contemporary ones. The common feature of all of these novels is the way they represent and treat the translator character as a liminal intellectual, standing between the east and the west and straddling the traditional and the modern. This liminality may also be seen as a metaphor for the cultural and literary modernization efforts of Turkey, a process which has had its own vicissitudes. Although contemporary Turkish fiction has come a long way since the birth of the Turkish novel in the 19th century and is very much in synch with its global counterparts in terms of its stylistic capabilities and strengths, our analysis has shown that the figure of the translator and the way it represents a vulnerable, male, western-educated intellectual, ailed by the consequences of cultural modernization, has remained a constant for over a century.

Biographies

Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar is a Professor in the Department of Translation and Interpreting Studies at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, and a visiting researcher at Glendon College, York University (2014-2015). Her research interests are translation history and historiography, translation sociology, retranslation, periodical studies and reception studies. She currently works on the methodological relevance of periodicals for research on translation history. She is the author of The Politics and Poetics of Translation in Turkey, 1923-1960 (Rodopi 2008). Tahir Gürçağlar is a member of the steering committee for the international EMUNI Translation Studies Doctoral and Teacher Training Summer School, and an ARTIS (Advancing Research in Translation & Interpreting Studies) Associate.

Ahu Selin Erkul Yağcı is a Professor in the Department of Translation and Interpreting at Ege University, Izmir. She received her PhD from Boğaziçi University with her doctoral dissertation entitled “Turkey’s Reading Revolution: A Study on Books, Readers and Translation (1840-1940)” (2012). Her research interests are translation history, book and reading history and reception studies. She currently works on translator-writers and their role in translation history in Turkey. She has been teaching practical and theoretical translation courses for over ten years.