Literary works are like mirrors that reflect national and cultural identities. Scottish literature has some of the best in the world, with the works created by successful Scottish authors having great appeal. Myths, legends, and folklores appear throughout Scotland’s history, with various literary genres in this context. This study focuses on the fairy tales compiled by Elizabeth Wilson Grierson. Scottish fairy tales are interesting and full of kelpies, selkies, fairies, seers, spirits, and more. Originally, fairy tales are anonymous verbal works in folk literature. They are transferred from one generation to another by narration and in this way transfer the culture of the society in which they were created to successive generations.

Fairy tales are embellished with extraordinary plots, extraordinary characters, and imagination and are sometimes published and become written literary works while being told from generation to generation, thus increasing the permanence of fairy tales. Fairy tales can be transmitted to wider masses only by being translated. This article researches the book The Scottish Fairy Tale compiled by the Scottish author Elizabeth Wilson Grierson and İskoç Masalları as the Turkish translation of this literary translated by Derya Işık.

The aim of this research is to demonstrate and illustrate on the basis of a theoretical framework the strategies the translator pursued while translating the fairy tale compilation. Literary works have different perspectives for translating proper nouns. This article’s research was carried out by focusing on the views and strategies suggested by Van Coillie (2014) and his model of analysis for the translation of proper nouns in literary works. In light of this model, the study evaluates Grierson’s fairy tale compilation and Işık’s translated version in terms of examples of the translations of proper nouns. The preferred method in this research includes searching which strategies the translator preferred to pursue and the motives behind her decisions and preferences, as well as analyzing the findings by giving specific examples. The corpus of the study is based on 27 fairy tales and their translated versions. The examples for illustrating how the proper nouns were translated in these fairy tales have been randomly chosen among the various fairy tales.

Based on the results from this study, the translator can be inferred to have pursued variable translation strategies. This study also searches the motives behind the translator’s preferences with respect to the strategies. Mentioning a few of these strategies alongside the motives behind them will be useful. Upon examining the strategies used for translating proper nouns, the most adopted strategy is clearly the strategy of reproduction and leaving foreign names unchanged from the source text. If one looks at why and for what kind of proper nouns the translator adopted this strategy, it is seen to have been used for translating the names of characters and places. As for the reasons and factors, the translator clearly preferred to leave proper nouns unchanged from the source texts due to their nature of being proper names and names. This study will also explain the strategy of replacing a proper name with a common noun that characterizes the person. The translator adopted this strategy, especially when translating names that describe and indicate the genus (type) of characters; the translator also used generic nouns for the names the original compiler had used as proper nouns. The translator's experiential referents in her own source culture can be said to be factors affecting this preference. When examining the strategy of turning to phonetic transcription or morphological adaptation, the translation can be said to follow this path regarding the translation of names of people and places that already have accepted equivalents in the target language. With regard to replacing a name in the source work with a more widely known name from the source culture or internationally known name with the same function, the translator is seen to have replaced words taken from the Scottish language with their more familiar equivalents. The translator is thought to have preferred this strategy due to these Scottish words appearing strange to readers.

When looking at the examples from the source text and the target text, they appear quite distant in terms of time, and the translator can be said to have been careful and successful when choosing the strategies for translating the proper nouns in this literary work from Scottish society and culture, which also contains many words and concepts from that culture. This study is thought to be able to shed light on prospective studies regarding the translation of proper nouns.