Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Uluslararası Dil ve Uygulamalı Dilbilim Çalışmaları Konferansı (ICOLALS 2022), Ankara, Türkiye, 21 - 22 Ekim 2022, ss.91-103
Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle is famous for the San Lorenzo Republic and its fictional Bokonon culture. The protagonist, American John happens to visit this island country to write a biography on a scientist and ends up becoming the Bokonist Jonah through an acculturation process. Vonnegut exposes the readers to the San Lorenzo culture through the San Lorenzo dialect and its newly coined words. In the beginning pages, readers are lucky enough to have the English versions as a reference, yet San Lorenzo serves as a natural language as the readers get to know the San Lorenzo culture more. This study conducts a comparative analysis of the transferences of the distorted words of the San Lorenzo language into Turkish, aiming to answer the question of what concept (translation or transcreation) suits better the transference of the words that do not seem to exist in any other languages. The findings of the study have depicted that translators adopted different translation approaches while transferring the San Lorenzo dialect. Fişek mostly kept the San Lorenzo effect as in the source text by copying the coined words to the target text whereas Göktaş and Eriş created their own San Lorenzo dialects reconstructing the Turkish words, and appealed to the target culture leaving hints for the readers to decode. To this end, this study suggests a fresh perspective for literary translation courses with a model lesson plan on the translation criticism of Vonnegut’s fictional San Lorenzo language.
Keywords: fictional languages, San Lorenzo dialect, translation education, a model lesson plan,
literary translation