Foregrounding the long-time backgrounded: Turkish translations of foregrounded heteroglossia and the postcolonial Identity of Trainspotting

Abstract

This study aims to analyze how the foregrounded aspects of the subversive novel Trainspotting (1994) are translated into Turkish. It situates the heteroglot novel Trainspotting by the Scottish author Irvine Welsh among the attempts that intend to subvert the hegemony of Standard English and the colonial desires of the British. The study is processed with the theoretical guidance of Homi Bhabha, Antoine Berman, Lawrence Venuti, Gayatri Spivak and Kwame Anthony Appiah, with the conceptual guidance of Mikhail Bakhtin’s heteroglossia and with the methodological framework of the theory of foregrounding. Although the theory of foregrounding will be the main methodological tool of this study, it will also make use of Gideon Toury’s norms (1995) to analyze the possible reasons of translators’ choices. After providing elaborated discussion on heteroglossia, the theory of foregrounding and the contextual frameworks of both source and target texts, a descriptive analysis of the translations of Trainspotting is carried. Within the textual analysis of the target texts, it has been observed that translators mostly deal with the foregrounded aspects of the novel with an inconsistent strategy. The heteroglot and vulgar language of the novel and the postcolonial identity enhanced with heteroglossia are mostly attempted to be relayed with nonstandard vernacular language. However, even though, this strategy gives a flavor of alienation in terms of the stylistic aspect of heteroglossia, it fails to retain the socio-ideological aspect of the language stratification.