Abstract:

This study examines how the culture-specific items in the historical narrative in Ahmet Ümit's (2015) Elveda Güzel Vatanım are reproduced in the English translation Farewell, My Beautiful Country composed by Rakesh Jobanputra in 2020. The study first highlights the general features of historical novels, the stylistic elements that distinguish the language of historical novels from that of the other literary genres, along with the potential challenges encountered in the translation of historical novels. Following these points, the study carries out an analysis of Farewell, My Beautiful Country. The analysis seeks to shed light on the translation strategies used to reconstruct what Margaret Somers and Gloria Gibson (1994) list as the four basic features of narratives: temporality, relationality, causal emplotment and selective appropriation. The analysis of culture-specific items is based on the reclassification of culture-specific items listed by Enikő Terestyényi (2011), who focuses on Sergej Vlahov and Sider Florin’s (1980) research. The analysis is also based on Javier Franco Aixelà’s (1996) translation strategies. The study explores which foreignizing strategies (repetition, orthographic adaptation, linguistic translation, extra-textual gloss and intra-textual gloss), and/or domesticating strategies (synonymy, limited universalization, absolute universalization, naturalization, deletion and autonomous creativity) are employed in the translation. Ultimately, the study concludes that both foreignization and domestication are employed in the English translation in a way that enables the translator to reconstruct the four major features of narrativity in the historical novel. The study reveals that the foreignizing strategies of repetition, orthographic adaptation as well as intratextual and extratextual glosses are used to reconstruct the temporality of the historical narrative in the English translation. The domesticating strategies of absolute universalization and naturalization are used to reconstruct relationality in the narrative, whereas the strategies of intratextual and extratextual glosses are used to reconstruct causal emplotment. Selective appropriation features in the Dictionary section that reveals which words the translator seeks to foreground in the target text.

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