The history of concepts from the perspective of translation studies: 'Minority' and 'ethnic group' in the Turkish literature

This study focuses on the concepts of "minority" and "ethnic group", one of the most discussed key concepts of today's politics, and their import and transfer processes in Turkey. To this aim, the concepts were both diachronically and synchronically analysed from the last decades of the Ottoman Empire to the present. The theoretical basis of the study was grounded in the perspective presented by the descriptive translation theories (DTS) and the methods of the history of concepts. In more concrete terms, the above-mentioned concepts were searched and traced back to in dictionaries, magazines and newspapers as well as key texts in accordance with the methods used in the history of concepts while their imports and transfers into the universe(s) of discourse in the target society were analysed in relation to the changing cultural repertoires. In this regard, having firstly elaborated on the theoretical framework, the study depicted the fundamental social and conceptual changes in the Ottoman Empire after the Tanzimat Edict (The Edict of Reorganization), and scrutinized how and with which translation procedures and strategies the concepts were imported into Turkish in such a period when those great changes and interlingual translation activities occured at their highest levels. After that, presenting the cultural repertoire of the early Republican period in Turkey, the study focused on the critical changes in the concepts as a result of the language revolution and intralingual translation activities. As a final point, the course of the concepts was observed through translations in the light of social and political developments as of the 1960s, but rather the late 1980s in terms of the increase in translated works on the concepts. Consequently, the study revealed that these multi-layered translation activities played critical roles in the import and transfer processes of the concepts, and in this respect, they were effective in framing the meanings of the concepts. Additionally, it concluded that the import and transfer processes went parallel with the acceptance and resistance conditions of the target system, because the established state discourse and the cultural repertoire specifically appear not to allow the exact import of the concepts until the translated works began to be published, and athough the alternative universes of discourse became visible after the '90s, it was observed that the established cultural repertoire has seriously continued to resist to such imports and thus in a way has succeeded to restrict the circulation of the concepts. However, of course, since the alternative universes of discourse symbolized by translated works could also attain the power to open up space for themselves, their main issues with their imported concepts have been brought to the agenda, discussed and accepted as reference frames in the system of target society. The study also indicated the fundamental conceptualizations and the core points comprising the mindset of the social history in Turkey by referring to the network of these imported concepts with other concepts in the target system. Last but not least, another result of the study is that the interdisciplinary interactions between translation studies and the history of concepts could provide rich opportunities for new researches.