Ayşenaz Koş’ study is on translations of Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe into Turkish, reception of these translations in the Turkish context and effect of translations on the feminist move in Turkey. Koş states that the journey of Le Deuxième Sexe in Turkish has always happened from a male point of view since translators, publishers, and editors are all male. Thus the translation of the book lacked the female touch and the feminist perspective which affects the way the book was and has been received in Turkey.
The book has partial and complete translations published in different periods by different publishing houses. Partial translations were all published in the 60’s and 70’s when there was not a powerful, influential and interventionist feminist move, which let the perception that Beauvoir was the writer of simple novels that are about love and sexuality. Only after the 80’s the book was published as a whole translation which included all the sections/chapters of the source text.
According to Koş, translators misunderstood the text (or maybe choose to misunderstand the text) and translated in a way that women sexuality stood out as the sole topic of the book and as a result the content of the book changed, which showed how men looked at the female world. The book was presented as a romance with a romantic and sexy image of woman on the cover although the publisher of the French version did not use any illustrations on the cover. As this is an ongoing study and Koş has not completed the content and discourse analysis of the translations, for now she could not make a strong connection between the content and the cover. Thus we are not able to compare whether these covers and the illustrations on the covers reflect the translated parts in the partial translations. However, the conclusions of the study will probably provide this information to the reader.
Simone de Beauvoir was embraced in Turkey with the feminist movement in 80’s. Until that time, she was known as the wife of Jean-Paul Sartre, who inspired him. Koş claims that this is related to the way that Simone de Beauvoir was presented to the reader. As she was introduced as a simple, romance-writing woman who happened to be the wife of a great philosopher, the target culture received her in a way that degrades the actual place of her in the feminist movement.
Koş used Pierre Bourdieu’s social theory as the theoretical framework of her study. She plans to analyze the way Simone de Beauvoir translated and received in Turkey with such concepts as field, habitus and capital from Bourdieu. Among the materials she is going to study as the corpus of her study are there the text itself, materials apart from the text (what is written on Simone de Beauvoir from the 50’s to today?), and paratext (all Simone de Beauvoir translations since 1962). I think that this corpus will show her a representative conclusion about how Simone de Beauvoir was perceived in Turkey after these translations and the effect of feminist movement. Although she did not specify what she meant by materials apart from the text, I guess these materials include newspaper and journal articles, interviews with the translator, publisher and maybe a feminist activist of that time, and academic papers. These, at the end, may help her define the frame for that day’s context for Turkish politics for literature and publishing. Of course, how Simone de Beauvoir was perceived in Turkey is not only related to the translation(s) of Le Deuxième Sexe, I am sure that translations of other books by her had also similar effects and I really think that they had also gone through a similar male-oriented process as Le Deuxième Sexe. Thus analysis of other translations of Simone de Beauvoir’s books may justify the Simone de Beauvoir which was represented in İkinci Cins.
Bourdieusian social theory may also help her contextualize the patriarchal publishing policies. By describing the field for publishing, translation, patriarchy, and Turkish politics of the time, Koş can place the translators, editors, and publishers into their individual habitus in terms of the translation of Le Deuxième Sexe, which finally help her reach conclusions about the male perspective in the female literature.
I am sure that the study will introduce a contribution to feminist translation studies research as it analyses a book which can be called the Bible of feminism and how it came to Turkey, as well as how it was perceived.
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