From Theory to Practice, From Theory to Analysis in Translation: An Analysis of the Novel Disgrace

This paper will present an analysis of İlknur Özdemir’s translation of J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) into Turkish as Utanç (2005) in the light of stylistic approaches to translation as expounded by Jean Boase-Beier in her invaluable book Stylistic Approaches to Translation (2006, and the revised and expanded version Translation and Style, 2019). It aims to demonstrate that translation theory, thanks to the cognitive turn in stylistics and translation studies, has come a long way from expressing shifts in translation with everyday expressions, such as loss of “voice”, “rhythm of thought” and “rhythm of speech” that J. M. Coetzee used to criticize the first German translation of his work Waiting for the Barbarians. Resorting to Fowler’s concept of “mind style” (1977), Boase-Beier regards the translator both as a reader who should attend to the “weakly implied meanings” that make it possible to reflect how people see the world differently and that this is also expressed in linguistic choices that may be revealed in stylistic subtleties such as metaphor, iconicity, ambiguity and foregrounding. In this paper, I will analyze J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) and its translation Utanç, translated by İlknur Özdemir and published by Can Yayınları in 2005, and demonstrate how foregrounding through repetitions of the word disgrace enables the author to depict his way of looking. The paper will also examine how Özdemir strives to preserve this in Turkish.