The population exchange between Türkiye and Greece in 1924 led to the forced migration of 1.5 million people on both sides of the Aegean. Due to the exchange agreement’s basis on religion, it also included Anatolia’s Turkishspeaking Orthodox Christian population known as the Karamanli (or Karamanlides), who had produced literary works within the Anatolian cultural repertoire for centuries. The Karamanli language involves Turkish written in the Greek alphabet with special characters also attributed to it. The Karamanli migrants became refugees in Greece after 1924, sent to lands hitherto unknown to them. During the migration process, they not only carried their personal belongings but also their religious and literary texts. Despite the difficulties they had integrating into their new country during the first years of settlement, the Turkish-speaking Karamanli migrants managed to continue the literary tradition they had in Greece. In this regard, the Karamanli literature can be classified under the category of migrant literature as it shares certain characteristics with the literary works produced by third-generation migrants, as seen in other examples elsewhere. Research on the Karamanli people has recently focused on bibliographic compilations and historical studies, with hardly any studies found focusing on the Karamanli literature through the lens of translation studies.

Having been greatly motivated by the author’s personal experiences in the translation of first-hand oral testimonies of the Greeks of Sapanca in the Asia Minor Studies Center in Athens, the present study begins based on the following research question: How can translation and migration relationality be read in the context of migration literature? Transnational “micro-cosmopolitan” approaches, being open to diversity and allowing for a bottom-up analysis of translations (Cronin, 2006, pp.7-23), can provide a more objective analysis of diasporic literature. In this regard, translation studies can significantly contribute to preserving an original ethnolinguistic tradition such as that of the Karamanli and transferring it to future generations regardless of national borders.

The publication of English translations and Turkish transcriptions of Karamanli poems in 2016 almost a century after their initial publication in Greece has enabled the international circulation of these texts. This article presents the English translation of the book titled Muhacirname, which consists of 25 poems selected from the newspaper Prosfigiki Foni (Muhacir Sedası), which was published bilingually in Greek and Karamanli in Athens between 1924-1927, along with its paratext (i.e., preface, notes, newspaper articles about the book, interviews with translators) and examined these in terms of translation norms. This study draws on Toury’s (2004) descriptive approach, which has exposed researchers to new perspectives on translation studies by introducing concepts such as initial translation norms, translator decisions, and operational norms, thus enabling them to question whether or not the translations had been carried out with a set purpose.

After examining the English translations of the selected poems, which had been translated by two different translators, the translators’ choice of subscribing to the norms of the source text can be said to indicate the poems to be adequate renditions of the source text. In doing so, the translators and editors of the book endeavored to highlight the specificity of Karamanli’s linguistic features. In terms of operational forms, the one translator’s additions to the target text and both translators’ remarks reveal the challenges posed by poetry translation.

Of prime importance in our findings is that, in terms of operational norms, the textual linguistic norms had manifested themselves in the form of culture-bound lexical items. The poets themselves, being first-generation migrants, borrowed culturally-bound lexical items from the Greek language as a result of acculturation while also maintaining the core elements of Anatolian folk poetry. In Muhacirname, the translators are realized to have preferred preserving these elements in the English translations. Although this study could not elucidate the exact reasons behind this translation project, it does confirm that publishing houses function as mediators in eliminating the indirect translation processes involving literary texts written in Greek and Turkish.