A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS ON THE TURKISH TRANSLATIONS OF ALBERT CAMUS’S NOVEL ‘LA CHUTE’ IN TERMS OF TRANSLATION CRITICISM

Abstract

Translation criticism, which is a comparative analysis of the original text and the translated text in a
methodical way, has become more important with the increasing need for qualified translators.
The aim of the comparative analysis is to research under which factors the text was translated into
the target language and to find the deviations from the source text. In this study, the three different
Turkish translations of the novel ‘La chute’ written by the worldwide known writer Albert Camus
and published in 1956 were examined comparatively in terms of translation criticism. Camus, who
is not regarded as a philosopher academically, still presented important philosophical views and
analyzed the position of man in the world from the point of meaning and action by following the
tradition led by the philosophers such as Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin
Heidegger. In his novel ‘La Chute’, in which he represented the effort of using the christian
symbols, he made fun of easy-going forms of humanist and non-religious moral sentiment in a
subtle way. This study, in which we studied the three different translations of ‘La Chute’ written by
Camus, consists of three stages. In the first stage, the era in which the writer lived, his personality,
his literary identity, his style and the message he wants to give were explained so that the source
text can be understood better; in the second stage, the date of the book, its type, content and
language, and the choice of words and the reason of writing were explained, and in the third stage,
different sentences were chosen randomly from the source text and their equivalents were found in
the three different translations, and then the relation between the original sentences and their
equivalents in three different translations were examined in terms of translation strategies and
Gideon Toury’s target-oriented approach. In the findings obtained in the study, the strategies that
the three translators used to translate the text were presented. The aim here is not to evaluate the
translations as good or bad, but to present a source for comparative analysis between a source text
and its translations in the future.