Functional and Literary Translation: An Analysis of the Turkish Translation of Friedrich Hebbels's Maria Magdalena

Abstract

The theory of functional translation takes the function of translation as its basic criteria to evaluate the translated text. The idea that the functional theory of translation can be applied to all types of texts, has led to a diversity of opinions on the field of translation studies and literary studies, as well. In this article the Turkish translation of Friedrich Hebbel’s Maria Magdelena has been studied. The aim is to analyze the question of to what extent the meaning loss occurs in the functional translation of literary texts. The guidelines of the functional theory of translation have been given and then the function of the rendered text has been discussed. Sample words and sentences and their Turkish equivalents which contribute to the “coherence” of the text have been studied comparatively and from the functional perspective. It has been observed that the original text’s literary characteristics were not transferred adequately into Turkish due to the translator’s oversimplification of the translation “scopos”, with the idea of improving Turkish language underlying the process of translation.