مرکز منطقه ای اطلاع رساني علوم و فناوري - An Evaluation of the English Translation of ‘The City in Crimson Cloak’ Through The Concepts of Gender and Rewriting in Translation Theory

Abstract :

As a woman writer, Aslı Erdoğan has been able to produce many works through her resistance against the established order of the world. The image of the city, the main theme of The City in Crimson Cloak, comes into body in the city of Rio. The book’s main character Özgür resorts to writing her version of “The City in Crimson Cloak”. The female translator of the text, Amy Marie Spangler, surveys the text with an attempt to rewrite it through a gender equality based approach. In this paper, the translation of her book is analyzed through an American translator’s motive to translate a Turkish story taking place in Rio. The aim is to trace the culture and gender related decisions in the translated text which seems to bear features of personalities of both the translator and the author. In the first part of the paper, Aslı Erdoğan’s writing style and themes in her books are surveyed from a native readers perspective. In the second part, main line of the story is drawn upon cultural elements in the source text. In the third part, the decisions made by the translator are studied via the cultural elements in the previous part under the concepts of gender and rewriting in cultural translation theory. After the process of analysis, it was realized that the translated version of the text became a culturally hybridized text with the translator’s attempt towards reflecting cultural boundaries, combining linguistic traditions and broadening the perspective of translation.