THE REFLECTION OF MAGICAL REALISM ON TRANSLATION: THE ALEPH
BÜYÜLÜ GERÇEKÇİLİĞİN ÇEVİRİDEKİ GÖRÜNÜMÜ: ALEF HİKÂYESİ

Author : Özge AKSOY -& Nezir TEMÜR
Number of pages : 240-251

Abstract

Translation studies constantly interacts with many fields such as literary studies, cultural studies and philosophy, and various sub-disciplines under the influence of these fields. So, schools and movements that leave a mark on these affected fields constitute a workspace for descriptive translation studies, and thus it becomes possible to study on how these schools, movements or their characteristics that determine them are transferred to the target texts. Magical Realism, one of the influential movements of postmodern literature, has distinctive and characteristic elements such as the combination of reality and fantasy, usual and unusual, or the use of realism and surrealism in a harmonious manner. A source text created under the influence of this movement, and particularly such elements representing the magical realism in the text must be transferred to the target readers and culture in the way that they can easily perceive and realize them. Yet the source text must not be ignored for the sake of comprehension and fluent translating. In this study, the elements of magical realism seen in the short fiction ‘the Aleph’ by Jorge Luis Borges and their Turkish translations are compared and analysed on the basis of Venuti’s critical approach to invisibility of translator and suggested strategies called domestication and foreignization. The aim of this analysis is to reveal the extent to which magical realistic elements seen in the Aleph are substituted or to what extent they are conserved during the translation process and thus to identify the invisibility status of the translator. The results show that the translator, by employing various translation procedures, has mostly foreignized the elements indicating that the presence of the translator and magical realistic features are reflected in the target text.

Keywords

Magical Realism, Venuti, domestication, foreignization, the Aleph, Jorge Luis Borges

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