The Appearance of Turkish Grammatical Evidentials in Fictional Narratives and Their Translation into English: The Case of "My Name is Red"

In this study, we investigate the lexical markers and the evidential strategies used for grammatical evidentials in the Turkish to English translations of Orhan Pamuk's novel "My Name is Red". The objective of the study is to determine the equivalents of evidentials in the target language of the translation, and to reveal any potential loss of meaning in terms of language typology-based translations as well as explaining the reasons of such loss. To make a comparative analysis, we created two separate corpora from the English and Turkish versions of the novel by using the Sketch Engine program. Taking into account the narrative types used in the construction of the novel, we evaluate the equivalents of evidentials -mIs and ImIs in English on the basis of the corpus. In this framework, we discuss the appearance of the sub-categories of indirectivity and the functions of evidentials in the narration on the selected examples by considering the translated samples in which the loss of meaning occurs. Our findings indicate that indirectivity is often not reflected in the translated form through inferentials, and the reported speech as well as language samples that carry uncertainty arising from indirectivity were lost during the translation. In certain cases, the meaning has been clarified by adding expressions such as once upon a time, I have heard tell to the propositions based on second-hand/third-hand evidence, and the oral culture.