Shaping the Field of Translation In Japanese ↔ Turkish Contexts I

by Esin ESEN (editor), Ryo Miyashita (Editor)

The academic discipline of translation studies is only half a century old and even younger in the field of bilateral translation between Japanese and Turkish. This book is the first volume of the world's first academic book on Turkish↔Japanese translation. While this volume gathered discussions on translation studies with theoric and applied aspects, literature, linguistics, and philosophy, the second volume deals with the history of translation, philosophy, culture education, language education, and law. It also covers the translation of historical materials and divan poetry. These books will be the first steps to discuss and develop various aspects of the field. Such compilation brings together experienced and young Turkology and Japanology scholars as well as academics linked to translation studies and translation, and also translators. Both volumes contain 24 essays written by twenty-two writers from Japan, Turkey, USA and China.

262 pages, ebook

Published June 6, 2019

About the author

Esin ESEN, is a, Japanologist. who specializes in Japanese language and literature, translation from Japanese and Japanese women’s literature (Nara-Heian Periods). She applied cognitive poetics and relevance theory to develop a method for translation of reader responsibility features of Japanese language into Turkish. Her PhD is on the Man’yōshū – the reader responsibility approach and cognitive poetics theory. She translated Murasaki Shikibu Nikki into Turkish from classical Japanese and Sasameyuki by the famous Japanese writer Jun’ichirō Tanizaki . She has been translating since the 1990s [Japanese, Spanish and English, Classical Japanese, Turkish (native)]. She also teaches theoric and applied translation courses at university level in these languages. Founder of Kotodama Istanbul book project themed Japan in Turkey and Turkey in Japan. Editor of “Shaping the Field of Translation In Japanese↔Turkish Contexts 1-2” the world’s first academic books on Turkish↔Japanese translation.

Reviews

[Devrim Güven]

World literature owes its existence to translation. So much so that, in the context of world literature, one is tempted to say, “In the beginning was the Translation.” All the trans-nationally appreciated texts that modified the Euro-centric world literature canon from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Ossian’s/Macpherson’s Fingal, from Cervantes’ Don Quixote de la Mancha to Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask, are not only works that were created or discovered in their original tongues, but also texts that have continuously been re-created and re-discovered in other languages. Nonetheless, world literature’s development and expansion through translation has always been shadowed by the problem of Euro-centrism. World literature canon consists predominantly of works written in, or translated into metropolitan languages such as English, French, Spanish and Portuguese, which are also used in most of the ex-colonial countries. Furthermore, scholars and translators of metropolitan centres tend to interact with non-European literatures in an “indirect” manner. Namely, translators select works that are written or share discursive homogeneity with European languages. Whereas scholars and critics tend to read texts that are written, reviewed in, or translated into the languages of metropolitan centres instead of mastering the indigenous language and culture in which the text is written. They also tend to “homogenize” and domesticate source cultures by adapting them to the context of the target cultures that actually belong to “heterogeneous” linguistic and cultural backgrounds. This centripetal canonization must be decentralized through alternative models of direct “translational” interactions between centre and periphery, and much more ideally between periphery and periphery. We designated three preliminary alternative models: a) the formation process of “Third World Literature” in Euro-American literary and academic worlds, b) the post-World War Two massive movement of “Japanese literature in English translation” that occurred chiefly in the USA, and c) recent and on-going “Japanese literature in ‘direct’ Turkish translation” experience (2003-2018). We will clarify how and to what degree “centrifugal” alternative models such as “Third World Literature,” “Japanese literature in English translation” and especially “Japanese literature in Turkish translation” could serve as valid models in deconstructing the “centripetal” structure of world literature canon.

Excerpt from the third chapter of this book, entitled "Non-European Literature in Translation: A Plea for the Counter-Canonization of Weltliteratur" (by Devrim Çetin Güven)

https://www.peterlang.com/view/978363...