The Use of Idiomatic Language as a Strategy for Receptor-Oriented Translation: A Study on Tomris Uyar’s Rendering of Flannery O’Connor’s Grotesque Stories: “The Lame Shall Enter First” and “The Comforts of Home”

Abstract

This study is concerned with an analysis of Tomris Uyar’s rendering of two grotesque stories by the American fiction writer Flannery O’Connor, “The Lame Shall Enter First” and “The Comforts of Home”, translated into Turkish as “Önce Sakatlar Girecek” and “Yuvanın Nimetleri” respectively. The article mainly focuses on the translator’s use of idiomatic language in the rendering of these grotesque stories as a strategy for conveying the semantic content of the stories to the receptor audience as well as for evoking in them the feelings and responses similar to those created in the source-text reader. In her translations, Tomris Uyar adopts a receptor-oriented strategy closely associated with Eugene A. Nida’s concept of Dynamic Equivalence. Out of a desire to achieve an easy, natural, and fluent style in translation, the translator relies heavily on the use of idioms in receptor language, thus creating in the reader the feeling that these stories were originally written in Turkish.