THE EXPRESSION OF VIOLENCE IN THE TRANSLATION OF INTERCULTURAL LITERATURE BY TURKISH-GERMAN FEMALE AUTHORS

Abstract

This work focuses on linguistic expressions of violence suffered by women and girls in the context of intercultural literature by female, specifically Turkish-German writers. Despite a long-standing history in countries such as Germany, France and UK, in Spain very few works by migrant authors are published and translated, and even fewer by female authors: among Turkish-German female writers, only Emine Sevgi Özdamar has been translated into Spanish. The present research analyses two works by Özdamar together with their translations into Spanish, as well as two works by Renan Demirkan, unpublished in Spain. The goals are to identify accounts of violence and to describe linguistic strategies used to describe them, as well as translation techniques. With this, we aim to disseminate a literary genre with a solid presence in Germany, but barely translated into Spanish. This proposal is framed in the context of transnational feminist Translation Studies and the study of gender-based violence. The research method is based on the description of translation problems in intercultural literature by Von Flotow (2000), as well as the classification of types of violence by UN Women. Results show that tales of violence suffered by Turkish-German migrants is a recurrent topos, while the linguistic strategies used to describe it vary according to the personal experience of the author in these (pseudo)autobiographical works. As a conclusion, a detailed classification of the features of intercultural literature and its translations could foster new publishing projects of this literary genre, thus contributing to its dissemination and to a more integrating and egalitarian society.