Insights in Transnational Translation:A case study in Robyn Rowland’s Poetry

Abstract

Robyn Rowland’s poems about Turkey and its history are unique in their representations of a poet’s dual perspective both from outside and from within. Her poetic depictions of the land she travels intensively are not only vivid presentations of landscape but also the personal reflections of its history and culture. Although her poetry on Turkey functions as a passage to Turkey for the readers in English, it also appeals to Turkish readers who wish to read about Turkey from the Western point of view, particularly in her poems on the Gallipoli War, which sets a common historical background for both Turks and Australians. This study is an analysis of the translation process of Robyn Rowland’s poems from English into Turkish to indicate the delicacy and particularity of translation linguistically and culturally. Poetry translation is not only transferring the lexical meaning from one language to another, but also transferring the cultural and emotional meanings in the poetics of the target language. The objective of this study is to present analytically the translation of Robyn Rowland’s poems into Turkish from the syntactic, semantic and cultural perspectives.