Analysis of the French Translation of "Küçük Ağa" by Tarik Buğra in the Light of Descriptive Translation Studies

Translation is a multi-directional, complex and interdisciplinary act. In literary translation, the translator is responsible not only with accurate translation of the source text in terms of vocabulary and grammatical patterns into the target text, but also with the transfer of the cultural elements between source and target texts. Although the translator often remains invisible, he actually plays a key role. In this study, the alterations, addition and omissions applied to the translated texts from Turkish to French in literature and the reflections of the decisions made during the translation processes in the translated text are discussed on the basis of “Küçük Ağa” by Turkish author Tarık Buğra. This book and its French translation, titled “Le Petit Agha”, are comparatively studied within the framework of the descriptive translation studies approach of Gideon Toury. The book reflects the speech styles of the Anatolian people, swallowing of the words in local dialects, accents and all other cultural elements embroidered into the story line taking place around the Turkish cities Konya, Kütahya, Düzce and Ankara, along with the usage of İstanbul dialect. This study covers three main titles as “transfer of religious elements”, “transfer of idioms and proverbs” and “transfer of proper nouns”. Thus, it aims to explain how the cultural elements are translated into the target text in the light of descriptive translation studies. The study has also found that the translator translated the book directly from the source text and employed no intermediate language.

Keywords

Literary translation, Little Aga, Gideon Toury, Descriptive Translation Studies, Tarık Buğra