A DESCRIPTIVE STUDY ON THE GRADUATE THESES IN TRANSLATION STUDIES DISCIPLINE

Translation is an important shareholder of today’s communication society and became an independent academic discipline in the name of “translation studies” at the end of the 20th century. Graduate theses are undoubtedly one of the agents playing a significant role in the development of this namely young academic discipline. In the present study, the graduate theses prepared in the field of translation studies in Turkey until 2016 were examined by using document analysis method with a descriptive point of view. The graduate theses about translation field which were prepared in other departments rather than translation studies departments were not included in the current research. The graduate theses being the research object of this study were obtained from the website of National Theses Center which is a branch of Turkish Higher Education Council. A content analysis of the aforementioned theses was conducted with the following variables in mind: academic level of the theses, the completion year of the theses, the main and sub-branches of the theses in translation studies and data collection methods used in the theses. The obtained findings reveal that the graduate theses generally focus on similar research areas and methodologies. In this way, some suggestions were presented to the young scholars of translation studies who are willing to pursue a career in this discipline by indicating research gaps of the field and some research topics which might inspire authentic research in the field were stressed