Shakespeare'in "Hamlet" metninin Orhan Burian, Sabahattin Eyüboğlu, ve Can Yücel çevirileri üzerine karşılaştırmalı bir çalışma

This thesis takes Shakespeare's Hamlet as the source text and compares its Turkish translations by Orhan Burian (1944), Sabahattin Eyüboğlu (1965), and Can Yücel (1992) as the target texts in light of Reception Theory which is one of the reader-oriented critical theories. This study first focuses on what Reception Theory is from the perspective of Translation Studies; next, it looks through Elizabethan period and socio-cultural, political and historical background of the sixteenth century England, characteristics of Elizabethan drama and summary of Hamlet. Then, having summarized history of Hamlet translations in Turkey, this study compares the above mentioned target texts. As Reception Theory requires the detailed analysis of the target cultural norms, the three target texts and their socio-cultural, political and historical backgrounds in the twentieth century Turkey are analyzed in terms of the main themes of the source text: power struggle, gender roles, and the individual's dilemma. While "Power Struggle" part deals with the fight for power between two opposing forces in the Kingdom of Denmark, the second part, "Gender Roles" takes the women characters to the center, and deals with the prejudice towards them; lastly, "The Individual's Dilemma" discusses the meaning of the individual's existence and the choice he makes between two alternatives that seem equally undesirable. However, the target texts in the Turkey of the 40s, 60s and the 90s look similar to or differ from one another at times compared to the source text since the translators are the members of the target society, and thus exposed to those periods' socio-cultural, political and historical developments. Reception Theory enables the translators to fill in the blanks and indeterminacy of the source text apt for their 'horizon of expectations' during the reading process as the theorists Wolfgang Iser and Hans Robert Jauss assert because there is no more an ideal reader as it is solely the writer of the source text. Thus, it is possible that a text may be interpreted and formed variously by different readers or even by the same reader when read in different times. As translators are the first readers and interpreters of the source text, it would be natural for them to interpret and translate the source text under the influence of their own socio-cultural, political and historical background. Keywords: Translation Studies, Reception Theory, William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Orhan Burian, Sabahattin Eyüboğlu, Can Yücel.