Reflections of humanism on Orhan Burian's translation of Shakespeare's Hamlet

Until the second half of the twentieth century, translation has been regarded as a simple linguistic performance which results from substitution of words in the source text with their equivalences in the target text. For this reason, it has been studied as a part of certain social sciences like linguistics and literature. The increasing studies and practice in the field proved that translation activity was a more complex phenomenon which involved participation of other disciplines. As a result, in 1980s, translation became an independent field of study as "translation studies", building its own models and theories. With the emergence of the recent theories, new concepts came to the fore. Traditional terms like "source-text orientation", "fidelity to the source text", "equivalence", "fixed meaning" and so on were replaced by more functional terms like "aim of translation", "cultural formation", "target-text orientation" and "interpretation". The Turkish Republic, younger than the developments in translation studies, had already put those improvements into practice in its acculturation period. The aim of the study is, firstly to have a broader look into the cultural formation of the Republican Era and present how translation gets involved in this cultural formation period and secondly to present it with a specific translation practice during the period.