Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Bolu Abant İzzet Baysal University (BAIBU) for the International Congress on Academic Studies in Translation and Interpreting Studies (ICASTIS) , Bolu, Türkiye, 29 Eylül - 01 Ekim 2022, ss.48
The Book of Dede Korkut is a Turkish epic significant in Turkish history, literature, and culture. It comprises a
prologue and twelve stories, all bound together in terms of epic theme and characters. Up to the present, The Book
of Dede Korkut has been translated into English three times, firstly by Sumer, Uysal, and Walker (1972), secondly
by Lewis (1974), and lastly by Mirable (1990). It is also rich in gender roles, emerging themes such as heroism,
bravery, manhood, womanhood, fertility, maternal instincts, and the relations between father-son, mother-son, and
wife-husband. For this reason, this study utilized Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as a research
tool to analyze the limited data collected from the stories. The corpus consists of Dede Korkut Hikayeleri by Orhan
Şaik Gökyay (1974) and its English translation made by Geoffrey Lewis in 1974. During the translation process
of this work, in which the cultural values of Turkish society are reflected, translators should master both the source
and target languages and cultures in order to overcome the translation difficulties due to the cross-cultural
differences. In this context, examining the English translation of Dede Korkut epic within the framework of
Fairclough’s CDA can be considered a convenient tool to detect the deviations in the target text, especially for the
translation of gendered discourse. Additionally, the research findings in this study have been evaluated within the
scope of Gideon Toury’s (1995) translation norms. As a result, it is observed that the translator tries to balance the
two cultures; however, in some cases, subjects himself to the norms that are active in the target culture. In this
regard, the findings reveal that the translator is closer to the acceptability pole, besides proving that the target text
cannot be merely adequate/acceptable.