A different perspective on the foreign: Murat Belge

Abstract

The concept of “foreign” and its translation is a controversial issue of translation studies in recent years. The main focus of this study is on the translations of foreign elements in modernist novels of James Joyce and William Faulkner into Turkish by a famous Turkish translator, Murat Belge. Foreignness is not limited to foreignization strategy, and there are more to discover about it beyond the claims of Schleiermacher and Venuti. In this study, foreignness is evaluated in three perspectives as foreign for source culture, foreign for translator and foreign for the target culture. In the evaluation, more concepts are benefited from like cultural distance, the horizon of expectation and cultural foreign. Besides, the mentioned foreignness is not taken into consideration just in terms of translation strategies because modernist narrative techniques’ as the stream of consciousness, interior monologues, and unusual time flow have effects on this foreignness in the frame of this study. In the light of the chosen examples from Joyce’s A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, translations of these modernist narrative techniques were scrutinized. It was concluded that Belge’s source-oriented and foreignizing translation strategy preserves the foreignness of the original works and foreignization was an unusual translation strategy for Belge’s time, the 1960’s in Turkey. At the end of the study, new concepts are brought into translation studies. These are the skopos-habitus scale and the introduction of foreign.