An analysis of literary translations' and translators' visibility/invisibility in terms of translation studies

The concept of the translation's and the translator's "visibility"/"invisibility" is a determinative factor in the formation of discourses on translation. The manifold conditions arousing from text type, form and style, together with the norms of target literary systems are the main factors determining translators' strategies. This dissertation presents a research on the "presence"/"absence" of translators involved in the translation process of a work written with a linguistic constraint in terms of style. The aim of this thesis is to investigate translators' "presence"/"absence" in terms of their "visibility"/"invisibility", "voice/silence. This thesis is based on the premise that translation is an interpretive act and translator, an interpreter and a rewriter. The corpus of this study consists of Georges Perec's novel La Disparition, its translations into Turkish by Cemal Yardımcı as Kayboluş, and into English by Gilbert Adair as A Void, as well as metatexts on these works. The corpus is analysed in the light of theoretical discourses on translator's "visibility" and "voice". This thesis aims merely to describe the above mentioned translation phenomena, because a descriptive approach provides us the necessary data to analyse translator's choices with all its rationale within the cultural and historical context. These choices of interpretation offer inferences on "visibility"/"invisibility", "voice"/"silence" of the translator. As a result of this analysis, it is determined that traces belonging to "presence"/"absence" of translators in Turkish and English translations of La Disparition constitute respectively different but also similar phenomena. In other words, with the analysis of translation's and translator's discourses as well as discourses on translation and translator, the complex and changeable nature of "visibility"/"invisibility", "voice"/"silence" within the context of linguistic and cultural constraints is explained. In conclusion, as a result of this analysis, it can be argued that different kinds of text-oriented factors -literary, linguistic, cultural, formal, structural, stylistic, semantic etc.- and different conditions of literary and cultural systems of translations/translators as well as have an effect on the perception of translator's "visibility/invisibility" and "voice/silence" within the country's translation tradition. In addition, it can be said that the contemporary translation approaches of translation studies have positively shaped this perception by providing a contribution to the de- and re-construction of the "original-translation" relationship. Keywords: La Disparition, Kayboluş, A Void, "presence"/"absence", "visibility"/invisibility", "voice"/"silence".