INTERNATIONAL 8th USBİLİM EDUCATION, ECONOMY, MANAGEMENT AND SOCIAL SCIENCES CONGRESS
A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF TURKISH TRANSLATIONS OF BAUDELAIRE’S POEM “ALBATROS” IN THE LIGHT OF GIDEON TOURY’S DESCRIPTIVE TRANSLATION THEORY
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Akademik Paylaşım Platformu Publishing House - APP Publications
The famous French poet Charles Baudelaire, who prefers a language covered with symbols instead of a descriptive language in her poems, uses a language characterized by imaginative intensity, metaphor and comparison, making it difficult to translate her poems into other languages. While some translators consider Baudelaire as a romantic poet, who emphasizes his individual feelings, translators who emphasize his language full of symbols and multi- layered images define him as a symbolist poet. Especially due to the untranslatable nature of poetry translations, it is likely that some questions will be encountered even if they are translated. After the second half of the 20th century, translation gained the status of an autonomous science with translation theories. In the light of translation theories, poetry translations made by translators can sometimes be source text-oriented and sometimes target text-oriented. In this context, Gideon Toury’s descriptive translation approach was taken as a basis to form the theoretical framework of the research. Toury, who made significant contributions to the development of translation science with his doctoral thesis “Translational Norms and Literary Translation into Hebrew, 1930-1945”, which he defended in 1977, published “In Search of a Theory of Translation” in 1980” and he became a pioneer of descriptive translation theory with his books titled “Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond” in 1995. Toury, one of the very few translation scholars who guide translators both theoretically and in practice, has himself translated many works into Hebrew, especially in the literary translation genre. According to the theoretical framework put forward by Toury, the translator making a number of decisions within the framework of preliminary norms, pre- process norms and process norms before starting the translation can shape the translation. Toury divides the translation system into two: “adequate” and “acceptable”. While adequate translations are close to the norms of the source text, acceptable translations are close to the norms of the target text. We examined the Turkish translations of the poem “Albatros” by Charles Baudelaire, one of the important poets of French literature, in his book titled “Les Fleurs Du Mal” (The Flowers of Evil), within the framework of Toury’s descriptive translation theory. According to the findings of this study, which is important in terms of revealing more clearly the factors affecting the changes in the translation process of the poem based on the cultural context of the decisions taken by translators, the form of the source text, consisting of four stanzas and sixteen lines, is preserved in both translations. It was observed that target text 1 was closer to the source text norms and therefore it was determined to be an adequate translation. It was observed that target text 2 was closer to the target text norms and therefore it was determined to be an acceptable translation.
