ABSTRACT The article examines the Turkish translations of the Thousand and One Nights for children in the post-2002 era. It focuses on the shift in national policies and how this shift shaped the translation of children’s literature. Beginning with an overview of the historical trajectory of the translations of the work into Turkish against the sociopolitical backdrop of the time, the study compiles and analyses post-2002 translations. The analysis exposes both a disregard for current translation studies literature as well as a state-led national transformation policy. Policy makers have effectively utilized the Thousand and One Nights (as a work deeply rooted in the older Eastern cultures) as a tool for political change, making its post-2002 translations a fertile ground for analysis.

ABSTRACT Translated by Maureen Freely and engaging with timely themes such as political Islam, Snow (2004) marked a major breakthrough for Pamuk as a representative of a smaller literature. A lesser-known fact, however, is that the British and American editions of the novel, published by Faber and Faber and Knopf, display notable differences. This study offers a critical comparative analysis of these shifts and problematizes them as editorial interventions that undermine the translator’s agency. As tangible outcomes of the editing processes to which Freely’s translation was subjected on both sides of the Atlantic, these shifts stem not only from distinctions between British and American English, but also reveal how translations may be reshaped by powerful actors in the publishing sector. Such actors seek to impose their own “horizon of expectations” and perceptions of small literatures. Editing thus becomes a negotiation among editors, copy editors, and translators, demonstrating their power to significantly change translations on a global scale.

ABSTRACT The dramatic writing tradition in Türkiye is shaped by the interaction between Western dramatic norms introduced through translation and Anatolia's local performative traditions, giving rise to attempts to forge a distinctive dramatic voice. This article examines the selection criteria and paratextual materials in all English-language anthologies of Turkish drama published between 1976 and 2011. Its aim is to foreground the image of Turkish theater these anthologies construct in the Anglosphere and to analyze the mechanisms through which the visibility of its distinctive voice is secured. The article concludes by identifying two tendencies in image-making through anthologization: an image of Turkish theater as derivative of its Western counterpart, shaped by the nation-state's official cultural policies, versus an image grounded in Turkish theater's distinctive voices, in which a non-hierarchical, intercultural exchange with the Western world is achieved.

ABSTRACT This article presents the case of Madonna in a Fur Coat (2016), the English translation of Sabahattin Ali’s novel Kürk Mantolu Madonna (1943). It first examines the factors that contributed to the book’s revival in Türkiye. Then, the focus shifts to how the translation of the book was presented to the public by the English publisher, Penguin, in the Penguin Classics series. Taken together, these two perspectives show how the resurgence of the novel in both the source and the target cultures formed part of an integrated process that enabled the novel to enter the “world republic of letters.” The article also presents a comparative textual analysis of the English and Turkish versions of Madonna, offering insights into the strategies employed by the translators to adapt a work to the expectations of an Anglophone audience whose encounter with this now classic work of Turkish literature had long been delayed.

ABSTRACT This article demonstrates the intricate connections between ideas of virality and translation in Orhan Pamuk's novel Veba Geceleri (2021), and its translation into English by Ekin Oklap, Nights of Plague (2022), from the perspective of translation as contagion. To this end, it discusses instances of transfiction, the East-West dichotomy, and heteroglossia in the plot. The study concludes that the novel's plot devices – namely, the translation of European scientific texts into Ottoman, and the island's linguistic diversity – appear designed to foreground the East-West divide and its intra-communal counterpart: the tension between traditional narratives and those shaped by Western rationality and biomedicine. However, these particularistic representations collapse in the international reception of the English translation, as the work is reframed within an intertextual network spanning languages, genres, and historical periods. The study aims to contribute to Translational Medical Humanities, and to debates on modern Turkish fiction in English translation.

ABSTRACT This article examines Turkish fiction in English translation as a site of cultural exchange. Drawing on the theory of world literature and Turkish literary and translation criticism, this study aims to investigate how translated Turkish fiction is and can be received in English. The article argues that historically, the discursive impact, or “aftermath,” of translated Turkish fiction in English has been muted by a limited critical reception, much of which has hinged on critical frameworks that employ formulations of native/foreign dichotomies. This article proposes that we reconceive translated Turkish fiction as spectrally adjacent to English literature, engaging Rebecca Walkowitz’s concept of the “born translated” novel for world literature studies. It considers two illustrative examples, Latife Tekin’s Dear Shameless Death and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s Time Regulation Institute, by outlining their reception in English and new possible pivots for understanding them.

ABSTRACT This article revisits Ottoman aesthetic discourse as a site of conceptual translation to complicate typical understandings of Ottoman literary modernity. Situating this discourse within global debates on modern aesthetics, the article argues that the introduction of aesthetics in the Ottoman context exposes key problems of knowledge translation in the modern era: how to translate across incommensurable cultural systems and convert epistemic differences into seemingly universal terms. Yet these translations involve more than the transfer of knowledge. Aesthetics becomes a field where the foundations of modern subjectivity are defined and contested. In negotiating the modern subject’s position between decadence and progress and between nature and history, Ottoman aesthetic discourse posits translation as the very process through which the modern subject comes into being.

ABSTRACT This article argues that the translation of Turkish literature by Maureen Freely and Amy Spangler is shaped to some extent by their women-centered agenda, which enhances global reciprocity in the translational flows of feminist narratives. The analysis is based on the methodology developed by Emek Ergun, who outlines distinct categories, including feminist politics of translation, geopolitics of translation, post-oppositional ethics of interconnectivity, and politics of reception, in order to explore the translational travels of feminist texts and discourses. Ultimately, it is concluded that five potential motivations underlie Freely’s and Spangler’s textual, paratextual, and extratextual strategies for promoting the transnational travels of Turkish feminist texts in a non-fetishising context: expanding the global visibility of marginalized women authors, revealing women’s agency, challenging normative gendered embodiment, highlighting women’s intersectional struggles, and demonstrating parallelisms within world literature to transform commercialized images.