Exploring Translations and Perceptions of Darwin’s The Origin of Species in Turkey
This paper seeks to help diffuse the uncertainty around the ever growing number of Turkish translations of Charles Darwin’s opus magnum, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859), particularly since the early 2000s. The first Turkish translation of Darwin’s well-known work took almost some one hundred and eleven years to appear in the Turkish market in 1970, when Sol Publications released a translation by Öner Ünalan. Despite the long haul with no apparent direct translations in Turkish, Darwin’s ideas began to circulate among Ottoman intelligentsia well before the 20th century. However, after all these years, in the 2000s anti-Darwinism became quasi-state policy when the Turkish Ministry of Education all but eliminated any mentions of Darwin and theory of evolution from its middle school and secondary education curricula. In contrast to these developments, there has been a notable increase in the number of Turkish retranslations of The Origin of Species and reeditions of first wave of translations after the turn of the millennium. This study aims to explore Darwin’s both portrayal and reception in Turkey, as well as his theory of evolution by natural selection, through an analysis of the “paratextual” (Genette 1997) elements in Turkish retranslations and adaptations of the same book. As a result, the study argues that translators and publishers involved in the production and perception of Darwin’s retranslations are “self-appointed” individual and institutional “agents” (Toury 2002) who promoted his ideas by introducing translations of the original work as well as its off-shoots in different forms.
BIOGRAPHY
Müge Işıklar Koçak is Associate Professor of Translation Studies at Dokuz Eylul University, Izmir. She received her B.A. degree in English Translation and Interpreting at Hacettepe University and M.A. degree in Translation Studies at Warwick University. She finished her Ph.D. in Translation Studies at Boğaziçi University with her dissertation entitled “Problematizing Translated Popular Texts on Women’s Sexuality: A New Perspective on the Modernization Project in Turkey from 1931 to 1959”. Her main research interests are translation history, translation and woman, readers and translation, translation of popular texts. muge.isiklar@deu.edu.tr
Enes Ekici is an instructor of English language at School of Foreign Languages, Karamanoğlu Mehmetbey University, Karaman. He received a B.A. degree in Translation and Interpreting in English, Turkish and German at Dokuz Eylül University in 2018 and holds an M.A. degree in English Translation Studies from the same university with a dissertation on Remote Interpreting Technologies. He currently is a Ph.D. student at Dokuz Eylül and mainly focuses on interpreting and translation technologies, and translation history. enes.ekici@kmu.edu.tr