Translating Cultural Capital: Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul in Romanian
Translating Cultural Capital: Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul in Romanian

Summary/Abstract: In the era of intense intercultural exchanges, literary translation is no longer seen as mere linguistic transfer, but, equally importantly, as a means to erect bridges between two distinct cultures. Great emphasis is placed thus on the translator’s role as an agent who helps spread the cultural capital of a given community/society beyond the confines of its own borders. This paper revolves around the Romanian translation ofOrhan Pamuk’s autobiographic novel Istanbul: Amintirile și orașul. Relying on the principles of the cultural turn in translation studies, the analysis aims to look into how the Turkish cultural capital represented by Pamuk’s novel is rendered into Romanian. On the one hand, consideration is given to the “exoticism” involved in this particular instance of cultural transfer, but also on issues such as stereotyping and the construction of the Self Other referential framework; on the other hand, we will apply Lawrence Venuti’s foreignisation / domestication dichotomy to investigate the procedures used for the translation of culture-specific references from Turkish into Romanian, with a view to identifying whether the translator imprinted a domesticating or a foreignising orientation to the target text.

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