Özet:

The linguistic revolution has been the most striking and atypical aspect of the very significant socio-cultural transformation that the Turkish society has been undergoing for more than a century. The language of the Empire was abandoned and the successful endeavour of constructing a new national language was undertaken. However, intralinguistic translation became a must in order to make up for the impossibility of reading old, especially literary texts. First the article looks into Halid Ziya Uşaklıgil’s simplification of his own novel Mai ve Siyah (Blue and Black) after 50 years of its publication as the most typical example of this attitude, which also demonstrates that the effort is inevitable. Secondly, it examines various efforts to purify Tevfik Fikret’s Rübab-ı Şikeste (The Broken Lute). The article finally deals with the text known as The Address to Turkish Youth annexed by Mustafa Kemal to Nutuk . The method employed in the article rests on the contrast between Ferdinand de Saussure’s idea of the ‘‘arbitrariness of linguistic signifier’’ and Emile Benveniste’s idea that ‘‘linguistic signifier is not arbitrary’’. Taking Saussure’s principle according to which ‘‘the signified changes if the signifier is changed’’, the article concludes that the three abovementioned simplifications cannot be successful.

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