Translating fictional identities: The case of to Kill a Mockingbird

It is a consensus among sociolinguists that one's linguistic choices represent his or her race, gender, social class, background, attitudes, and above all, character attributes. In other words, one's individual use of language, made up of his/her idiosyncratic syntactical and lexical choices, denotes his/her "identity". Similarly, fictional characters perform their identities by means of language, and thus, the best way to explore fictional characters' identities is to analyze their dialogues. Within the context of translated literature, reflection of these identities in the target text depends on the linguistic choices of the translator. This adds to the translation problems faced in literary translation, most of which have been addressed so far. A great number of literary translations, especially classics, have been analyzed, compared, and evaluated to see if and how successfully the target text could maintain the source text effect in terms of style, narrative technique, and literary devices. In this study, the dialogues of the characters in five Turkish translations, by five different translators, of the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, translated into Turkish as Bülbülü Öldürmek, are analyzed to find out if there are any linguistic shifts in the dialogues of the characters, and how these shifts affect the way readers perceive the identities of the characters. In other words, the purpose of this study is to see if the linguistic behaviors of the characters in five different translations titled Bülbülü Öldürmek represent the same identities as those in To Kill a Mockingbird do. Considering the distinct linguistic behaviors of the characters and the incompatibility between the source language and the target language, the analysis is expected to yield informative results on the (re)creation of fictional characters in literary translation, and the effect of translators' decisions on the formation of fictional characters.