“Friday cannot be black!”: Euphemizing a religious taboo through translation

Abstract

This paper is the first to describe Black Friday in Turkey as a taboo from the perspective of translation studies. It intends to analyze the euphemistic translation strategies employed by national and international companies that conduct business in Turkey and aims to find out whether their euphemisms potentially assist them in marketing their products. The corpus of the study consists of 15 euphemistic Turkish translations of 'Black Friday', which were retrieved from the websites of 27 national and international companies. The translations were analyzed in consideration of Warren's (1992) classification of euphemism procedures. The analyses revealed that the companies predominantly adopted two strategies: overstatement and implication. 16 of 27 companies were observed to use overstatement and ten to employ implications concerning the describers (companies), the described (Friday), and the event (Black Friday). Only one company was found to have adopted the borrowing strategy. It was concluded from the analyses that euphemized translations of the 'taboo' phrase Black Friday proved beneficial in removing or replacing the socioculturally unacceptable components of the event and helped the featured national and international companies' campaigns in Turkey be culturally and socially more acceptable as they increased their sales and profits just as the un-euphemized Black Friday did in the other parts of the world.