tc dokuz eylül university institute of social sciences translation and ...

complete, because of its peculiar place, that of being possibly the first translation. It
is not abridged or adapted but has a full text as far as it goes.
Another remarkable point is the translations from an intermediate language.
There are four translations identified in the corpus that are from French instead of the
source language English. Out of these four, only Ardıç’s and Beşli’s versions
mention that it was translated from French. What is interesting about Ardıç’s is that
in this translation there are some footnotes to some of the puns explaining how the
two words make wordplay in English! The next one Beşli’s which gives a prologue
under the title “Eseri Sunarken (presenting the work)” explaining that Beşli had
translated it from French but after his death it was revised by Naime Halit Yaşaroğlu
comparing from its original language, English. They claim that their translation was
directly based on the original but confess that they shortcut some of the puns in
English because those puns do not match with our language!
The other version from French is that of Mater, which is understood to be
from the second language, through an article about the cultural facts in Alice in
Wonderland (Toral Barda, 1998; 124). The fourth one is Özbay’s rendition, which
although it was not mentioned in the book, one comes to the conclusion that it might
have been rendered from French, the language that was very popular in those years in
Turkey (1973), because of some of the names that are changed, e.g. from Bill into
Peter, Dinah to Sarman like in Beşli’s, Marry Ann to Marian. It has also very similar
translation of some puns as that of Ardıç’s, which was also translated from French,
such as Chester kedisi (Ardıç) - Çester Kedisi (Özbay); this was translated into
French as Chat de Chester (Carrol, 1980), Dana başlı Kaplumbağa (Özbay, Ardıç),
Akbaba (Özbay, Ardıç). These three examples make it clear that these two target
texts were translated from the intermediate language, French, as the three names in
the source text are indeed quite different from the ones in the translations. The last
example is unique. The wordplay, ‘pig or fig?’ was translated as ‘Keçi yavrusu mu,
geyik yavrusu mu?’ (‘chévre, ou cerf?’ in French – rhyming, ‘kid or fawn?’ in
English – not rhyming) which is far away from what it clearly says in the source text.
Apparently, the translator from the intermediate language, most likely French, chose
these animals in order to compensate the pun and get the same rhythm and when
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