Pierre Loti'nin Aziyade'sinde çevirinin ve kentin izleri: Çeviri göstergebilimi ve kent göstergebilimi çerçevesinde bir özde çeviri örneği

In this research, we studied the concept of watermark translation through Pierre Loti's first work Aziyadé (1879) within the framework of the semiotics of translation and the semiotics of space. Proposed by the semiotician, translator, and translation scholar Sündüz Öztürk Kasar, the concept of watermark translation refers to a narrative from elsewhere, which presents itself either be (a) place (s) of arrival or (a) place(s) of departure and it involves the transfer of linguistic, cultural, social, and historical signs from these places to the context of reception. In this process of transfer, the text is produced through a translation operation carried out in the author's mind. This thesis argues that the novel Aziyadé qualifies as a text of watermark translation and it can thus be cited as an exemple of such works. Since the linguistic and cultural context presented in the work (19th-century Turkish and Salonica and Istanbul) is different from the language and culture in which the work was published (19th-century French and Paris), the author attempts to convey signs from this foreign and 'exotic' environment by translating the natural world into natural language navigating between the conceptual worlds of these two language-cultures, that is, by an operation of preliminary translation accomplished in the author's mind. One of the aims of our research is to examine the signs that have undergone a translation process in the work Aziyadé and to identify the translation techniques by which these signs are conveyed to the reader, thereby demonstrating that Aziyadé is truly a work of watermark translation. The unit of analysis in our work are the signs representing the city, classified by Öztürk Kasar as onomastic, historical, and cultural signs. According to our analysis, conducted at the intersection of translation semiotics and semiotics of space, Loti acts as a translator using different meaning making strategies: such as writing the native name of a sign in French transcription, providing the French equivalent of the sign, offering definitions and explanations in parentheses or as inline quotations within the sentence, comparing a specific sign from Turkish culture with a cultural element present in the conceptual world of French reader, or describing the sign in his text by naming it or not. In this study, in addition to highlighting the traces of translation in the original text, the Turkish translations of the work (the original back-translations) and its English translation (the indirect watermark translation) have also been examined. While most of the strategies manifesting watermark translation are reflected in the original-back translations and in the indirect watermark translation, the definitions and explanations given in parentheses have been omitted to avoid repetition. The decisions of the Turkish translators and the English translator regarding the reproduction of the meaning of the signs were analyzed according to the Systematic of De-Signification in Translation developed by Öztürk Kasar, and we found that the de-signifying tendencies of obscuring the meaning and the under-interpretation of the meaning are predominant. Therefore, we concluded that the majority of signs representing the city return to their context of departure and that since these de-signifying tendencies remain within the semantic field of the work, the city's image has been only slightly altered. By scrutinizing the transfer of signs, we have revealed not only the traces of the city and the translation in the original text of Aziyadé but also demonstrated that Pierre Loti's work titled Aziyadé is indeed a text of watermark translation.