This paper explores strategies to deal with linguistic and artistic details in Ottoman women poets' works and discusses the importance of paying attention to gender issues in translations. As texts written by women from the early modern and/or modern periods are rare, translating poetry written by Ottoman women from the 15th to 19th century is a critically important contribution to the field of Middle East Women's Studies. However, in order to discuss the gender issues in poems by women, translations should reflect their linguistic and artistic details. For instance, one of the ways Ottoman women poets reflected their group ethos and claimed their space in the male-dominated area of poetry is that they acknowledged eachother by writing nazires (paralel poems) or tahmises (quintains) to each other. Interestingly, in the 19th century, writing tahmises to Zeynep Hatun who is known to be the first Ottoman woman poet, is a common practice among the women poets. The original poem by Zeynep, which is in couplets, are used as the first two lines and three new lines are added to finish the new poem. The problem is that Zeynep composed her poetry in the 15th century but most of the tahmises were composed in the 19th century. There are linguistic differences between these periods and if the purpose of translation is to study gender issues in Ottoman poetry, the translation should be close to the original so the half of these tahmises have to be translated in an archaic English. However, by doing so the translator has to define which period is archaic and whether or not it corresponds with the archaic English. If the poems are translated without considering the linguistic difference, the English version will not reflect the dialog between two periods of women's literary history.

The novel form was introduced to Turkish literature first though translations from Western, mainly French, literatures during the Tanzimat era (1839-1876), a period of reformation and westernization in the Ottoman Empire. These early translations, which were usually referred to as "adaptations" or "borrowings" by their translators, diverge greatly from the source texts. The point of departure from the source, Western texts--what early novelists chose to change or not to translate--allows us to understand the frame of mind of the early Turkish novelists: what they liked and disliked about western novels; what novelties in western novels they embraced and rejected; and most importantly how they repeated each other independently in their choices. The study of differences rather than similarities between target (Turkish) and source (Western) texts will show that early Turkish novels can be read as representations of a Tanzimat mentality rather than individual samples of westernization. As a result, a unified reading of early novels will help us to answer questions like "What was influential in early novelists' selection of western texts to adapt, translate, or rewritet" and "Why do we find a similar male character formation in early Turkish novels that were translated from or inspired by different western novels." This paper will discuss the departure from the original texts which will be interpreted as shared concerns and needs of the early novelists during a politically challenging time by exploring early translations with a focus on Ahmet Lutfi's translation of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe in 1864.

This paper addresses the "afterlife" of Orhan Pamuk's Kara Kitap (1990) in Guneli Gun's and Maureen Freely's translations. It intends to problematize our understanding of concepts such as "translation," "adaptation," "free paraphrase," and "transfer," questioning the limits of these concepts. Gun's translation of The Black Book (1994) received harsh criticism by book reviewers in the Times Literary Supplement, who questioned her language skills and her "AmerEnglish." Their preconceived notions of how a Turkish text "should sound like" in English was belied by Gun's translation. Subsequently, Pamuk commissioned Maureen Freely to translate the novel anew. Given the dare situation of translation from Turkish into English, the imbalance of which is obvious in the history of translation between the two languages (only 177 literary works were translated between 1882 and 2007), the case of the new translation of a Turkish novel strikes us as unusual and unexpected. A close study of the two translations and how they have been received in the English-speaking world reveals interesting facts as to how a "world" writer travels abroad, away from the country, language, and culture of origin. It illuminates Pamuk's indebtedness to his translators' art and craft in order to make his works available to a wider audience. The study of translation reviews of The Black Book demonstrates that book reviewers treat translations as if they were transparent copies of the original. It shows how literary commentary in a largely monolingual public sphere overlooks the translators' role and agency, the process and product of literary translation, and the poetics and politics of it. When literary translation as an aspect of text production is overlooked, this may contribute further to homogenization of culture production and marginalization of notions of diversity, among languages, literatures, and peoples. It throws light on recent trends in globalization in the sphere of book and culture production. This approach aims to reveal an alternative view of a writer and his works, one that looks at him through his translators. It intends to create a forum for discussion on "world" literature in general and on Turkish literature in translation, in specific.