This book tries to stııdy the relation among narratology, traductology, and cultural studies through the example of the translation and the reception of certain Turkish novels in Spain and consists of three major parts. The first (Traductology and Narratology) tries to investigate from a theoretical point of view the relationship between those two disciplines mainly through the studies of Kitty van Leuven-Zwart and Shoshana Blum-Kulka. We consider narratives as a form of discourse and, from that point, we try to find common grounds between both disciplines beyond the stylistic level according to the grammar of the text. Perhaps the most important of these points are the shifts in cohesion and coherence (especially the latter if we think of cohesion as a part of coherence). In translation, there are always shifts in the coherence of the text, and in narrative texts, the most important of those are the shifts in cultural aspects due to the implications (the non-said).
These implications are a natural form in the discourse, perfectly understandable to a native speaker. The author of the original assumes that they are understood by the reader, but in the case of translations this is not usually so. Being a product of the culture, the real meaning of the implications may go down to very deep levels and it is the mission of the translator to make them understandable for the reader of the other language.
The cultural implications may come from two sources: the first is what we all consider culture, i.e. education, and the other is our social (and cultural) background in a very broad sense. In the first case, one of the most important things for the authors of narratives is their literary tradition. Here begins the second part of the book where we investigate the literary background of the writers under study in this book (Yaşar Kemal and Orhan Pamuk) trying to demonstrate that it goes beyond the mere Turkish tradition thanks to the crucial role of translations in their own culture. After this, we examine what kind of critical reception these authors have in Spain to discover that it is usually full of cultural prejudices.
This is the main point that distances these Turkish authors from the Spanish reader: cultural prejudices. So, though our cultures are not too different at certain levels, there must be something that makes us, as Spanish readers, see the Turks as poles apart. In the third part of the study (Definition of Culture), we can see that we are not as dissimilar as might be expected and so the Spanish reader can easily understand the cultural implications in Turkish novels, provided that the translator (and most of all the text itself) is able to awaken the reader’s interest for such knowledge and the reader is willing to give it his attention. |
