Abstract:

This paper analyzes the translation of Turkish loanwords (i.e., Turkisms) from literary works in Bosnian to German. The contemporary Bosnian language is rich in Turkisms that were mostly adopted during the Ottoman reign. The corpus for the analysis was selected from the novel Grozdanin kikot [Grozdana’s Giggle] by Bosnian writer Hamza Humo (1927). The German translation of the novel title was not a literal translation of the original, as the translator Manfred Jähnichen (1958) instead opted for the title Trunkener Sommer [The Drunken Summer], and the novel was a success in German-speaking regions, with many positive reviews subsequently being published in newspapers. The Turkisms in this novel mostly refer to objects and persons, and some of the lexemes have been labelled as archaic, while others are still in everyday use. However, all of these lexemes are considered part of the Bosnian and Herzegovinian culture. Translating culture-specific concepts is often a challenging task. Therefore, this paper aims to analyze the translation strategies that were employed when translating Turkisms from Bosnian to German in this novel. The first phase of the analysis identifies all the lexemes and phrases of Turkish origin and accounts for them in monolingual and bilingual dictionaries. Finally, the study compares the findings to their translation equivalents in the novel. A semantic analysis provides answers in terms of whether Turkisms in Bosnian and Turkisms in German represent false cognates. This research also yields a glossary of Turkisms from this novel with their translation equivalents in German.

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