Losses in the translations of the novel "Saladin" by Jurji Zaydan from Arabic and English into Turkish

Translation refers to the transfer from one language to another. However, it is an important discussion in the literature whether this transfer is always possible and to what extent the literary text, which has a unique language structure, can be transferred to the target language without losing this feature. Based on this, this thesis study considers the problem of translation losses and defends the argument that it arises from two basic reasons such as the domination over the specific field and text types. While scientific and technical texts have a direct meaning, literary texts differ due to the linguistic features of the authors. Cultural and structural differences are the reasons for the difficulties seen during the translation of literary texts. For example, if the meaning between the source language and the target language does not match, and there are grammatical and cultural differences, it will be inevitable to experience losses in the translation between these two language pairs. In addition to all these, the differences between languages cause loss of translation at first hand. This loss increases even more in translations made from a third language. It can be said that if a text is transferred from the source language to a third language by means of an interlanguage, the losses in translation will increase exponentially. Indeed, in such cases, the translator must devote great efforts to minimize the level of loss in translation. In order to contribute to the field of comparative translation studies, the comparative text analysis of the historical novel "Saladin" written by the Lebanese author Jurji Zeydȃn, was performed based on the translations of it including the one by Zeki Megamiz from Arabic to Turkish and the one by Cuma Vural from English to Turkish. This study consists of an introduction and three chapters. In the introduction, the purpose, method, scope and limitations of the study were examined; in the first chapter, the theoretical framework was presented. In the second part, the above-mentioned novel was analyzed briefly by giving information about the author of, and in the third part, the grammatical and cultural losses identified in the translation process were examined by giving examples from the source text by means of a table.