Portrayals of love and lovers in translations of popular songs: Turkish popular music's translation into / from English and Arabic

This thesis investigates portrayals of love and lovers in Turkish popular music's translation from/into English and Arabic. With the aim of finding answers to the questions of what are the similarities and/or differences between the source songs and target songs in terms of their portrayals of love and lovers, what translational strategies are used in song translations, and how can certain aspects regarding portrayals of love and lovers be categorized, the thesis presents a descriptive and comparative analysis of the selected source and target songs within a theoretical framework consisting of the concepts of skopos (Vermeer 1996), translation norms (Toury 1995) and domestication-foreignization (Venuti 2008). Analysis of the songs under investigation reveals that the similarities and/or differences between the source and target songs concerning the portrayals of love and lovers are resorted to in accordance with their translators' goals, i.e., skopoi. One possible skopos for all target songs analyzed in the present thesis might be argued to be the goal of making the final products successful and popular. Thus, it can be argued that the translators do not only translate lyrics but also import the success and popularity potential of the source songs. Yet, the results of the analysis also display that the semantical content of the source songs has not been always rendered as closely as possible in the target songs. Thus, it can be concluded that the changes in matricial or textual-linguistic norms might be done in order to conform to the aesthetic, ideological, or cultural expectancies of the target audiences, while the similarities to the source songs can be related to the intention of serving new types of genres or ideas and importing their features to the target audience. On the basis of the findings of the analysis of the songs, the thesis also suggests a categorization for analysis of portrayals in song translations which consists of six categories that are point of view, focus, tone, cultural changes, writing style, and aesthetics. The suggested categorization, however, does not imply dichotomies as a translator may choose to apply multiple strategies at different parts of the target song lyrics that may be described with all or some of the categories.