The Translatability of Cultural Elements in Yaşar Kemal’s Orta Direk

• Main Author: Didem Kaya Soykan
• Format: Article
• Language: deu
• Published: Hacettepe University 2020-12-01
• Series: Hacettepe Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Dergisi
• Subjects: yaşar kemal; translation strategies; categorization of “cultural term”; domestication and foreignisation; cultural items; kulturelle elemente; übersetzungsverfahren; domestizierung und verfremdung; kategorisierung der kulturellen elemente
• Online Access: https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/pub/huefd/issue/59130/744255

This article aims to analyse cultural items in the German translations of Yaşar Kemal’s novel Orta Direk as Der Wind aus der Ebene by Helga and Yıldırım Dağyeli and Margerete Bormann. To this end, it attempts to find answers to the following questions: Is it possible to translate the culture of a society into another language? Do these cultural items find expression in the target language or do they fail at the limit of translatability? To find an answer to these questions, the cultural elements identified in the novel were first classified according to Peter Newmark’s categorisation of “cultural term” (2010). Then these elements were analysed according to the translating procedure. For this purpose, the methods used for the translation of these elements were categorised as foreignisation and domestication suggested by Lawrence Venuti (1998). It was found that the domestic translation strategy was predominantly applied to the analysed cultural elements. Few cultural specifics were translated using foreignisation. This conclusion shows that while cultural elements of the source language found expression in the target language in a way, some aspects of the source language culture were lost in the translation.