An interpretive approach to translation: Can Yücel’s translation of The Great Gatsby

Abstract

This study is concerned with an analysis of Can Yücel’s translation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby into Turkish -Muhteşem Gatsby- in the light of the Interpretive Theory at large and Jean Delisle’s translation procedures (Expansion and Economy) in particular. In his rendering of the novel, the translator adopted a strategy based on conceptualizing the ‘sense’ behind the source-text message through the process of deverbalization, and then reformulating that message by using a language that sounds quite familiar to the target reader. Instead of establishing equivalences merely at linguistic level, the translator used his linguistic and extra-linguistic knowledge to extract the explicit and implicit sense behind the source-text message, and then re-expressing that sense through the discourse of the receptor culture. This is a strategy intended to achieve textual and contextual equivalences rather than finding out correspondences at lexical and phrasal level. Based on these considerations, in this article, exemplary extracts selected from the target text were analyzed with a view to showing that the strategies employed in the rendering of the novel involve features that reflect the basic tenets of the Interpretive Theory. Within this framework, an attempt was made to illustrate that these strategies lend themselves well to the application of Delisle’s translation procedures, yielding results that confirm their relevance to the analysis of Can Yücel’s translation of the novel.