The Works on the Ottoman Translations
This article tries to analyze academic studies on the Ottoman translations from the Tanzimat period to the beginning of the 20th century. In order to achieve this, the author looks at the ‘story' of the concept of ‘translation' in the Ottoman culture before the Tanzimat period. Furthermore, the term literary translation should not only be considered with its literary meanings and limited to the main literary genres, but also studies showing the translation culture around the literary translation should be taken into consideration. Thus, some recent works using the methodologies of the newly emerging field of translation studies and applying these new methodolgies to the historical data in order to understand the phenomenon of Ottoman translation intensively are emphasized due to the fact that those studies aim to go beyond the questions of what are the title of translations and who are the translators. These studies displayed the very fact that a certain continuity and integrity took place between the Ottoman and Republican period instead of a clear discontinuity at least in the ‘conceptualization of translation and its methodologies”. The beginning of literary translation from the Western literatures into the Ottoman language in the second half of the 19th century is taken into consideration with a particular stress on the studies showing the emergence of new genres in their cultural and social contexts. The contributions of different ethnic and language groups, who are speaking Turkish but expressing themselves literally in different alphabets such as Greek or Armenian, to the emergence and constitution of new literary genres in the Ottoman literature are also assessed on the basis of their translations into Turkish in their own alphabets.
HAŞİM KOÇ
