The Indicative Role of Retranslations for the Turkish Leftist Discourse: Using Berman's Translation Criticism Path to Analyze Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei as a Case

Abstract

According to the results of the retranslation project - "A Descriptive and Critical Look at Retranslation: Retranslated Works in the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey" (2013-2016) carried out at Bogazici University, two big waves of retranslations in non-fiction leftist works were identified: a boom in the late 1960s and early 1970s and another wave, a rejuvenation period, since the late 1990s until 2016. The Communist Manifesto occupied a central position in the corpus as it tops the list with 37 retranslations. The ideological and commercial tension between recent direct retranslations and the former indirect ones, which are accused of out-of-date terminology and self-censorship, are investigated in this study. This study aims a textual and paratextual scrutinization of two indirect and two direct retranslations of the book, namely by Ege, Erdost, Satligan, and Kavas, in the framework of an adapted version of Antoine Berman's translation criticism model. The abundance of translations indicates retranslation's potential to trigger a value-creating process in the receiving culture, because thanks to the retranslations, the previous translations, their historical circumstances and their translators' agencies have become visible. This specific case also gives us food for thought in comprehending the indicative role of retranslation in the transformation of Turkish leftist discourse. Moreover, it illustrates the interdependence between retranslation and canon formation, because the abundance of retranslations from the original source language in such a short time span and adoption of conservative translation strategies signal that the work is being canonized in the receiving system.