A descriptive study on the Turkish translation of Captains Courageous

The aim of this thesis is to conduct a thorough descriptive analysis on one of the Turkish translations of Captains Courageous (1897) by Rudyard Kipling. The original novel is regarded as one of the early examples of young adult fiction, a genre that has been underresearched both in literary studies and translation studies. Captains Courageous seems to have a special place in the systems of translated young adult and children's literature in Turkey since there are twenty-six translations of the book in total, all conducted after the establishment of the Republic of Turkey. The translation that was carried out by Kamuran Şerif [Saru] and published in Arabic letters in 1928 right before the alphabet reform is selected as the focus of the descriptive analysis since it is the first translation of the work and it represents one of the most critical periods in Turkish history, namely the early Republican Period. The methodology of the descriptive analysis is mainly based on the theoretical contributions of the prominent members of the Descriptive School. While Gideon Toury's target-oriented theory (1985) is used to observe the norms governing the translation process, Itamaar Even-Zohar's Polysystem Theory (1978) and Andre Lefevere's notion of "patronage" (1992) are also benefitted from in an attempt to clarify the parallels between the translator's strategies and the dominant ideological and poetological tendencies of the early Republican Period. The findings of the descriptive study indicate that the equivalence relationship between the source and the target texts could generally be defined as "acceptable" (Toury, 1995, 56) although when lower-level decisions of the translator are taken into account, it could be claimed that the translator skillfully moves back and forth between the adequacy and acceptability poles. The findings also reveal that most choices of the translator are in accord with the poetics of his time and that the ideological tendencies of the period could be observed in the decisions of the translator as well as in the foreword written by Ahmet Cevat [Emre], one of the prominent Turkologists of the period in question.