The cultural turn and ideology in translation: Reflections of period ideologies in literary translations through the examples of Gulliver's Travels and Darkness at Noon

This study aims to reveal that the act of translation is not only a linguistic transfer but also an example of historical, cultural and ideological rewriting. In this study, the Turkish target texts of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon were comparatively examined within the framework of the political, social and cultural conditions of the periods in which they were translated. While making these comparisons, not only the linguistic relationship of the translations with the source text, but also how they were positioned in the target cultural system and what kind of ideological interventions they were subjected to were analyzed. In the study, a qualitative research method was adopted and detailed comparisons were made between the texts, and archive and political documents of period and news in various publications were also evaluated. Toury's Norms, Reiss and Vermeer's Skopos approach, Lefevere's concepts of patronage and rewriting, Zohar's Plural System Theory and Althusser's approach to the ideological apparatuses of the state were used as the theoretical framework. The results obtained reveal that the act of translation cannot be considered independently of the ideological structure of the period. The target were rewritten by making them compatible with the ideological orientation of the period and by using methods such as censorship, self-censorship and cultural adaptation. In this context, the study shows that translation can function as a cultural planning tool and that literary translated texts can be evaluated as documents that carry and reflect the ideological understanding of the period.