BEF 2011/3 – Professional Behaviour [Turkey]

A translator is someone from whom we expect complete fidelity in their work, or as close to it as is possible.  Indeed, their identity qua translator is bound with the degree to which they faithfully reproduce the prose or poetry they translate: the more freely they interpret the text, the more creative they get in their rendition of the poet’s verse, the less they could be said to be translating, and would instead find themselves more on the creative side of things.  But the difficulty with translation is in the semantic differences between the original work and its translation.  Those writings that have a strong national flavour often use language that is charged with strong social and cultural meaning, much of which might be lost – as Robert Frost defined poetry to be – in translation, particularly when heavy with idiom or patois.  Some texts are so laden with such local colour that they are all but destroyed in the attempt to translate them.  Fortunately, this is not the case with Ersan Üldes’ story Professional Behaviour.