“The One” “to Rule the Other” Translations: Comparative Analysis of the Turkish Translations of The Fellowship of the Ring and The Hobbit from an Intertextual Perspective

Abstract

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien is one of the most outstanding British authors and the creator of an imaginary world called “the Middle Earth”. Tolkien’s novels prominent with a new world and a fictitious language have become quite popular worldwide. However, the fictitious words and expressions in Tolkien’s novels are challenging for the translators since the equivalents of these words may not be found in the target language. Çiğdem Erkal İpek, the translator of The Lord of the Rings, is the first Turkish translator taking the responsibility of transferring Tolkien’s fictitious concepts into Turkish. During this transfer, she invented new fictitious concepts which are not used in the target language. By this way, The Lord of the Rings (Yüzüklerin Efendisi in Turkish) has become one of the most popular novels in Turkey. On the other hand, The Hobbit, Tolkien’s another novel about the Middle Earth, was translated into Turkish by a different translator. Since the above-mentioned two novels narrate the events occurring in the same imaginary world, a consistency may be expected in the translated versions of these books in terms of fictitious words and expressions. In this context, the present study aims to analyze the similarities between the Turkish translations of The Fellowship of the Ring and The Hobbit within the scope of intertextuality in terms of the transfer of fictitious language in Tolkien’s novels. Accordingly, the examples of fictitious words and expressions selected from these novels will be examined from the perspective of intertextual relations among the translated texts. By this way, the study will argue whether a translated text can go beyond the scope of the intertextuality and whether the translation can become a source text for future intertextual references in the target literature.