Tristram Shandy Beyefendi’nin Hayatı ve Görüşleri Adlı Eserin İngilizceden Türkçeye Çevirisine Bourdieu’nün Sosyolojik Kuramsal Çerçevesinden Bakış

Abstract

In the last three decades, interest in sociology has picked up great momentum in Translation Studies and increasing attention has been paid to the social factors that surround an act of translation. Sociologically-oriented research in Translation Studies has enabled the identification of the relation- ships between the external conditions of a text’s creation and the narrower steps of the translation process. So far, translation scholars who have attempted to explore sociological approaches in Translation Studies have often benefited from Bourdieu’s thinking. Through its involvement of different levels of analysis, Bourdieu’s perspective helps researchers discover different aspects of cultural practice, in this study, the book translation. These aspects range “from the relationship between the cultural field and the broader field of power to strategies, trajectories and works of individual agents” (Bourdieu, 1993, p.16). As Bourdieu (1993) suggests, in order to fully comprehend a given cultural work, due attention needs to be paid to all levels of analysis, each consisting of various components. In this light, this study aims at concentrating on text structures in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman and translation strategies in its Turkish translation on the one hand, and, on the other, it focuses on the phenomena of translation beyond a textual level. Combining these two levels through Bourdieu’s theory of cultural production, this study entails a comprehensive translation analysis by employing Bourdieu’s key concepts. As a result of the aforementioned discussion, this study concludes that, macro translational choices and strategies in the Turkish translation of Tristram Shandy are not reflected on the translation strategies at a micro level as expected. Ultimately, the translator’s choices including (i) the use of notes/footnotes, (ii) the use of Ottoman Turkish, and (iii) the use of explicitation in the Turkish version of Tristram Shandy seem to fail to fulfill the expectations of “serious literature” readers, which are structured by the field of restricted cultural production and, which largely differentiate from the expectations of “popular literature” readers.