A study on pragmatic, lexical and grammatical-textual equivalence of Orhan Pamuk's translated work, Istanbul: Memories and the city

Abstract

The motivation behind carrying out this study was to see to what extent equivalence is attained between Pamuk?s İstanbul: Hatıralar ve Şehir and its English translation, Istanbul: Memories and the City. Equivalence was searched at three levels: at pragmatic level, at word and above word level, at grammatical and textual level.Prior to the analysis, the original work was read to reveal possible sources of problems that might put the attainment of equivalence at risk. Thereafter, the translation of the original work was studied to identify the procedures that were adopted by the translator to deal with the problems with emphasis on whether these procedures proved to be successful in communicating the intended meaning and feeling. The analysis was carried out in three sections: equivalence at pragmatic level, equivalence at word and above word level, equivalence at grammatical and textual level. At pragmatic level, the central issues of the discussion were coherence, register, time, setting and function. At word and above word level, lexical items unshared by the target language, metaphors, metonymies, synecdoches, proper nouns, loan words, neologisms, collocational patterns, hyperboles, euphemisms and cultural words provided a focus for discussion. And at grammatical and textual level, word order, pronominal system, tense, plurality, shifts, cohesion and conversational implicatures were the main issues that led the discussion.The study revealed that the translator achieved equivalence between the original work and its translation to a great extent. At pragmatic level, equivalence was achieved between the source language text and the target language text in terms of the text function, setting and coherence. However, the translator was seen on occasion to deviate from the register of the original work and to modernize the archaic and age-specific vocabulary. At word and above word level, several procedures were adopted to achieve equivalence between the source language and the target language such as componential analysis procedure, transference, translation by cultural equivalence, paraphrase and deletion. At grammatical and textual level, the translator was seen to shift the linguistic structure of the source language and to adopt the structures that would sound natural to the target readers.