A functional overview of translation of economic texts in Turkey between English and Turkish

Translation of economic texts mainly covers translation of financial, banking, insurance and institutional texts used in business life. Together with the impact of globalization, the establishment of multinational companies and proliferation of international trade activities led to an increase in translation activities of the economic field. As a result, economic translation that gained a significant workload in translation sector began to attract the attention of translators and researchers. Even though the number of translators and researchers that deal with economic translation has increased day by day, it has been observed that the academic studies carried out in this area have remained behind other translation areas. This study aims to question the functionality of translation of economic texts in Turkey by means of sample translated texts in the language pair of English-Turkish, and to create a systemic and functional overview for this field in translation studies. Thus, in the study, pragmatic, linguistic, cultural and stylistic constraints observed in translated economic texts produced in the language pair of English-Turkish were identified and dealt in terms of translation studies. The corpus was composed of economy reports that use terms most intensely and economy magazines that use terms least densely. The texts in the corpus were analyzed according to functional translation theories and approaches. As a result of the analyses, it was seen that the functionality of the translation of economic texts depends upon linguistic, pragmatic, cultural and stylistic constraints. To put it in a clearer way, it has been concluded that the functionality of translations are affected not only by textual factors, but also by extra-textual factors such as subject knowledge, characteristics of the audience, features of text type and sub-type, purpose of translation, time and place of publishing and research skills of translators. Key Words: Specialized translation, Translation of economic texts, Functionality, Translation constraints, Text type/sub-type, Textual factors, extra-textual factors