THE PLACE OF UMBERTO ECO’S WORKS IN THE TURKISH TRANSLATIONAL LITERARY SYSTEM: HOW THE OPEN WORK BECAME “CLOSED” IN ITS TURKISH TRANSLATIONS?

The aim of this study is to describe the place of Umberto Eco‟s works in Turkish translational literary system. The author has a wide spectrum of identities and works in his own country and Europe. This study tries to demonstrate to what extent these identities have known in our country and, which works are translated into Turkish. Are those works in Turkish representative for his “authorial intentions”? Who translated them? Which publishing houses are interested in translating his works? When those works are translated into Turkish? With which motivations are they translated? With these questions which seem to be adequate also for a translation history research, I aimed to present Umberto Eco‟s translational adventure in Turkey and in our language. I described the situation considering Eco‟s works as products which are supposed to transfer some new ideas, their translational adventure as process, the publisher‟s politics as editorial norms and their decisions as actions, which create some values and effects in the target culture. In addition I tried to describe The Open Work’s very interesting translational adventure in Turkish as a case study because of the existence of its three different translations in Turkish. I focused on publisher‟s decisions about choosing translators and the process of proofreading, and the advertising campaign the book as the publisher‟s translation politics. I used for description Toury‟s preliminary norms, Vermeer‟s skopos theory and Chesterman‟s approach to translation ethics as conceptual tools.