Journal of Language and Literature Studies
Vol. 6 No. 2 (2026): June

Material Culture-Specific Items in İstanbul: Hatıralar ve Şehir and Translation Issues into English

Soliman, Heba (Unknown)
Sudartinah, Titik (Unknown)



Article Info

Publish Date
23 Jun 2026

Abstract

This study investigates the translation procedures employed in rendering material culture items from Turkish into English in Orhan Pamuk's memoir İstanbul: Hatıralar ve Şehir (2003), as translated by Maureen Freely in Istanbul: Memories and the City (2006). Drawing on Vinay and Darbelnet's (1995) taxonomy of translation procedures and Newmark's (1988) classification of culture-specific items, the study adopts a mixed-methods research design, combining qualitative textual analysis with quantitative frequency measurement. A corpus of 50 purposively selected material culture items was compiled and categorized into four Newmark-derived domains: houses and towns (72%), food and drink (16%), transport (10%), and clothing (2%). The analysis reveals that literal translation (32%) and borrowing (28%) constitute the predominant strategies, followed by modulation (16%), equivalence (10%), adaptation (6%), generalization (4%), and marginal occurrences of loss and explicitation (2% each). These findings suggest that the translator prioritized linguistic transparency and cultural fidelity through strategies that either preserve source-culture specificity or facilitate target-language comprehension. Implications for translator training, cultural mediation, and cross-cultural literary reception are discussed.  

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Journal Info

Abbrev

jolls

Publisher

Subject

Education Languange, Linguistic, Communication & Media Other

Description

Journal of Language and Literature Studies is an open access journal which provides perspectives of languages, language teaching, and literature studies. This journal has the Focus and Scope at presenting and discussing outstanding contemporary issues in line with Applied Linguistics, English ...