What’s in a Title: Sir Wydham Deedes, Allen & Unwin, and Reşat Nuri Güntekin’s The Autobiography of a Turkish Girl

Speaker: Özlem Berk Albachten (British Academy Visiting Research Fellow, Department of Languages and Cultures, University of Reading)

This research seminar is a hybrid event & is free & open to all

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Özlem Berk Albachten’s paper will focus on the first translated Turkish novel in Britain: Reşat Nuri Güntekin’s Çalıkuşu (The Wren, 1923), translated by Sir Wyndham Deedes and published by Allen and Unwin Publishers as The Autobiography of a Turkish Girl in 1949. Based on the correspondence between Sir Deedes and Allen & Unwin between 1945-1949 preserved in the Archive of British Publishers and Printing held at the University of Reading’s Special Collections, the paper will examine the publication process of the novel from pitch to marketing and evaluate the cultural, political, business considerations that shaped the action and decision-making process of “the gate-keepers” that regulated the translation flow from Turkish.

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Özlem Berk Albachten is currently a British Academy Visiting Research Fellow, Department of Languages and Cultures, University of Reading, working on a project that examines the dissemination of Turkish literature in translation in the British book market from 1945 to the mid-Seventies through an evaluation of readers’ reports, sale records, and business correspondence with series editors, translators, and professional readers concerning the assessment of translation projects from Turkish, preserved in the Archive of British Printing and Publishing held at the University of Reading’s Special Collections. She is a Professor of Translation Studies at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. Her research interests include translation history, intralingual translation, retranslation, Turkish women translators, and autobiography/life writing. She is the author of Translation and Westernisation in Turkey (2004) and Kuramlar Işığında Açıklamalı Çeviribilim Terimcesi (Annotated Translation Terminology, 2005). She co-edited Perspectives on Retranslation. Ideology, Paratexts, Methods (Routledge, 2019), Retranslation in Turkey (Springer, 2019), Routledge Handbook of Intralingual Translation (2024), and the Special issue: Retranslation, Multidisciplinarity and Multimodality for The Translator (2020).