Translation strategies used in transferring culture-specific elements in Russian-Turkish translations of F. M. Dostoyevski's novel the Karamazov Brothers

Literary works reflect the cultural characteristics of the society they belong to and play an important role in cultural transmission. Therefore, culture-specific elements are of great importance when it comes to literary translation, which acts as a bridge between two different cultures, societies and languages. However, in the process of literary translation, the translator encounters some translation problems, especially in the transfer of culture-specific elements, because languages and cultures differ from each other in many aspects. Therefore, in the process of transferring culture-specific elements from one language to another, it plays an important role which translation techniques the translator uses and which translation strategy the translator adopts. The aim of this study is to determine how the culture-specific elements in F. M. Dostoyevsky's work "The Brothers Karamazov", published in 1880, were transferred from Russian to Turkish in two different translations and which translation strategies were adopted by the translators. For this purpose, two different Turkish translations of "Karamazov Brothers", the translation made by Ergin Altay in 2001 and the updated translation of Nihal Yalaza Taluy in 2016, were analyzed comparatively in order to examine how the culture-specific elements in the source text were transferred. While analyzing both translations, the criterion of "classification by object" presented in the book "The Untranslatable in Translation" (1980) by Bulgarian translation theorist S. I. Vlahov and linguist S. P. Florin was taken into account in the classification of culture-specific elements. The translation techniques preferred by both translators in the transfer of culture-specific elements were determined within the framework of the "Stylistique Comparée" approach of French-Canadian linguist J. P. Vinay and translator J. Darbelnet. In cases where these techniques were insufficient to explain translator preferences, culture-specific elements were examined by applying additional translation techniques (omission, gloss translation etc.) . The translation strategies adopted by both translators at the macro level in the translation process were determined according to Friedrich Schleiermacher's distinction between "domestication" and "foreignization" strategies. As a result of the examination, this study showed that the translator Taluy adopted a source text-oriented translation approach and adopted the "foreignization" strategy, while the translator Altay remained loyal to the target reader-oriented translation approach and preferred the "domestication" strategy.