A Theoretical approach to the Turkish translation of "The History Man"

ABSTRACT Translation, which is considered to be approximately three thousand years old, has always played an important role in intercultural communication. For thousands of years besides making translations, people have also tried to make formulations on how to make translations, which is called to be a 'prescriptive approach'. In 1970's, translation studies underwent a radical change with the introduction of the 'descriptive approach', which aims to study how translations are made instead of how they should be. One of the first and most important descriptive translation theories is the Polysystem theory, which offers a model for studying how literary systems and translated literature function, interact and evolve. The Polysystem theory gave inspiration to many other translation theories, including the Norm theory, which is considered to be an extension of it The Norm theory studies translations with a target-oriented approach by describing the actors and constraints (norms) by which the translations are shaped in a cultural system. By replacing the concern whether there is equivalence between a translated text and its source with the concern that what kind of equivalence there is between them, the Norm theory has made an important contribution to translation studies. In this study, a literary translation is compared with its source text according to the methods offered for the practice of the Norm theory in order to determine the norms under the effect which the translator made his decisions and the degree of the equivalence between the two texts. An interview made with the translator is used to reinforce the results obtained VU