English Languge

This thesis discusses the various socio-cultural developments that gave rise to the wide recognition of Elif Shafak in the Arab field of cultural production after her novel The Forty Rules of Love was published in 2012 in Arabic translation. It overviews the changing Turkish-Arab relations, mainly in the realm of culture and ideology, from their mutual Ottoman past to their post-Ottoman present. It also revisits the changing status of Sufi mysticism (major theme of The Forty Rules of Love) in Turkish and Arabic cultures according to prevailing ideologies and popular practices of religion. It includes in the discussion each culture’s relation to the Western world, especially as regards cultural translation. It also discusses the roles played by different kinds of agency in establishing Shafak’s name in the Arab context and the dynamics of representation and cultural translation that were at play in such undertaking. Its theoretical framework is structured through reference to Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, Homi K. Bhabha’s concepts of hybridity and cultural translation, and Mona Baker’s account of social narrative theory, combined with Nedret Kuran-Burçoglu’s synthesis of imagology and translation studies. The thesis is concluded with a descriptive and critical analysis of two samples extracted respectively from Shafak’s novels The Bastard of Istanbul and The Forty Rules of Love, the former for understanding translational actions around the Turkish identity and the latter for understanding translational actions around Sufi mysticism. The analysis incorporates the English original, the Turkish translation and the two Arabic translations of each novel.

Practice is an integral part of research in creative and performing arts and design (CPAD). It refers to both "making art work and reflecting on it" (Gray and Malins, 2004, 3). There is an emphasis in this kind of research on process and experience. Points of research are explored through methodology that is open to innovative approaches which aim to contribute to "the advancement of creativity, insights, knowledge and understanding" in the area of their operation (AHRC, 2021). Translating across Sensory and Linguistic Borders: Intersemiotic Journeys between Media (2019) is a volume of research in CPAD that is concerned in its practice with intersemiotic translation. Edited by Madeleine Campbell and Ricarda Vidal and authored by a number of practitioners who combine research, creativity and translation, the book offers a stimulating, re-constructivist approach to the practice of translation (often taken or expected by non-practitioners to be an objective, mechanical process) through integrating it into the kind of practice mentioned above as characteristic of artistic research.

This article offers an outline of the literary translation flow from Turkish to Arabic between 1923 and 2005 based on a catalogue of translated literary works that were published in this period that was compiled for the purposes of this research. The aim of the article is to understand what kinds of works make it into a literary-linguistic domain when the host system has a turbulent history with the source system (in the case of Turkey and the Arab Middle East, a series of ideological and political factors were behind such turmoil). Based on Even-Zohar's concept of clusters, the bibliographic data are consulted to trace the systemic infrastructure that helped determine which works from the source literature were admitted into the host literature. The process is carried out through identifying sets of relatable elements (translations, agents) that clustered around six thematic elements to form the repertoire of translated Turkish literature in the Arabic literary system. The analysis shows that the translation flow from Turkish to Arabic continued despite the historical rancour between Turkey and the Arab Middle East.