On The French Translatıon Of Sabahattin Ali’s Kürk Mantolu Madonna (La Madone Au Manteau Du Fourrure)

Translation, which is an intercommunal requirement, not only supplies information flow from the source language into the target language but also serves as a bridge between communities by helping them know the social, political, cultural and scientific attitudes of each other. Yet, communication problems stemming from the linguistic differences between languages create a doubt about the translator’s loyalty to the original text. The question is whether the translator transfers the author’s fictional world, where s/he gets free of the real world and freely expresses herself/himself, into the target text with loyalty or the translator intervenes in the author’s imagination by acting as a co-writer? In reply to this question, which is the point of origin for translation studies, it can be argued that there are not only linguistic differences but also socio-cultural differences between communities; thus, it is really difficult for the translator to be loyal to the source text by maintaining cultural equivalence between texts. In this study, our goal is to compare and contrast one of the important Turkish writers Sabahattin Ali’s novel Kürk Mantolu Madonna and its French translation la Madone au manteau du fourrure by Jean Descat. Some words of Ottoman Turkish origin that were used in this 1943 dated novel have not been simplified in its French translation because of the translator’s respect to the author’s literary skills. In this context, the translator’s transference of the author’s emotions and thoughts into the target text by taking the cultural and linguistic differences into account will be studied under the guidance of target-oriented translation theory based on vernacularization and alienation strategies shaped by Friedrich Schleiermacher.

Keywords

Vernacularisation, alienation, equivalence, cultural transference.