Cultural elements in the Turkish translations of hemingway's short stories

This paper investigates two Turkish translations of fifteen short stories written by Ernest Hemingway. The first, published in 1972, belongs to Yaşar Anday and the second is a more recent translation from 2018 by Elif Derviş. Derviş's translation is the only work in Turkish that includes all Hemingway's short stories. Several challenges arise when the source and the target language do not share the same or a similar cultural background, as in the case of English and Turkish; one of these challenges is transferring the culture-specific elements. The aim of this paper is to discover which strategies are employed by the translators when translating Hemingway's short stories into Turkish, with a focus on culture-specific items. The findings are discussed mainly in relation to the writings of Javier Franco Aixelá and Eirlys E. Davies. The latter draws on Aixelá's translation strategies and creates a more flexible categorization consisting of seven strategies employed by translators when dealing with culture-specific items: preservation, addition, omission, globalization, localization, transformations and creation. The significant time span between the two translations, their different cultural and social background and the translators' style result in rather different texts. The strategies employed most often are preservation, in particular regarding proper nouns, words, and expressions foreign to both English and Turkish, and localization. Omissions are extremely rare and they appear only in the first translation, whereas additions are more often in Derviş's case. Nevertheless, both Anday and Derviş preserve the foreign flavor of the source text, thus keeping the Turkish readers aware of the fact that what they read is a translation of a text written in a different cultural context. © 2021 Karadeniz Technical University. All rights reserved