The problem of losses in translation; comparative review of translations of Khalil Gibran's Sand and Foam from Arabic and English into Turkish

Translation has been an important bridge for different societies and their cultures since the day it emerged. People have acquired a vast majority of the information about different nations, such as linguistic, cultural etc. through translation activities. Poetry translation differs from translations of other types of literature due to its objective and subjective rules, as well as its grammatical, formal and semantic characteristics. There are certain elements that need attention to be taken to ensure that a poem is transmitted from the source language to the target language as accurately as possible. In this study, poetry translation, difficulties encountered during poetry translation and the problems of translation losses are discussed. In addition, this study defends the argument that the problems in poetry translations are caused by two main problems: objective and subjective elements and the losses in translation strategies. Since the texts of poetry are evaluated in the context of the richness they contain and are more difficult than other types of literature, it is inevitable that losses may occur to ensure equivalences during their translation. Although the poems in the source and target texts are not expected to match in every sense, poetry translations should be evaluated by using qualitative research methods to minimize the translation losses experienced. From this point of view, in this study, the translations of Khalil Gibran's book of poems and aphorisms called Sand and Foam from English and Arabic were evaluated based on Mona Baker's translation strategies and Andre Lefever's seven strategies on poetry translation, then the losses incurred during translations were tried to be determined and translation suggestions were made to eliminate the losses. This study consists of an introduction and three main parts. In the introduction, the purpose, method, scope and limitations of the research were explained; In the first part, the theoretical framework is specified; In the second part, Arabic poetry and its historical development, the author of the work in question, the works of the author and his religious teaching are emphasized; In the third part, the poems were classified in terms of grammatical, semantic, stylistic and miscellaneous losses and explained with examples in tables.