Özet:

Few texts of Ottoman literary monuments from the nearly six-hundred-years of the Ottoman Empire are in print or in modern European languages. Moreover in 1928, the Turkish Republic dispossessed the old educated elite of their most valuable asset‒literacy. Worse, most Ottoman literary monuments are extant only in manuscript form and may exist in several versions, somewhat or radically different from one another. A chronicler, for example, may not have written what was attributed to him. A published edition is unreliable if its text was not critically edited. Bureaucratic or temporal handwriting variations also present difficulties. First, a critical edition must be chosen or prepared after philological principles. Proficiency in modern Turkish, Ottoman Turkish, Arabic and Persian is mandatory. Second, a translator must determine its genre and sub-genre as literary (i.e., poetry and prose as humor, satire, sarcasm, praise, mysticism) or non-literary (governmental or commercial). The audience may be quite small, perhaps only a few thousand scholars and students. For example, a translation of government documents may be useful to modern historians. One must then select an analogous genre and style in the language of the target audience. The style of translation must suit that of the source document yet stay within the register of the intended contemporary readers. A balance must be struck between the need to communicate and the need to introduce something new and original to the target audience. Every attempt should be made to limit the cultural strangeness and temporal remoteness of the document.

Anahtar Kelimeler: