The representation of Turkey in British trade publishing after 15 July 2016. An analysis conducted on the translations from Turkish to English published in the UK

Abstract

After the 2016 failed coup, the Turkish government implemented a series of measures that strongly restricted democratic freedoms in the country. This caused the UK media to propose a representation of the country in which the coup and the government reaction, together with the concepts of authoritarianism and censorship, played a central part. The present article aims to understand which role British trade publishing played in this new representation, analysing all the translations of trade titles from Turkish to English, published by British publishers in the UK, comparing the periods before (from 1 January 2012 to 15 July 2016) and after the coup (from 16 July 2016 to 31 December 2019). It tries to understand if some central socio-political events of contemporary Turkey, as the coup and its aftermath, the Kurdish issue, and Turkish intervention in the Syrian war, have had more space in the translations published in the UK after the coup. It also investigates if, after the coup, the choice of titles and authors to translate has been influenced, and if given paratextual elements (specifically, books’ descriptions on the British publishers’ websites) have shown a tendency of being linked to Turkey’s contemporary socio-political situation. It then presents an evaluation of the behaviour of British trade publishers toward the coup and their new focus on the state of Turkish democracy.

Keywords

Representation, Turkey, Trade Publishing, Translation, UK

How to Cite

Spinicci, M., (2021) “The representation of Turkey in British trade publishing after 15 July 2016. An analysis conducted on the translations from Turkish to English published in the UK”, Interscript 4(2). doi: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444.2398-4732.1212

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Authors

Michele Spinicci (Università degli studi of Milan)

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Creative Commons Attribution 4.0

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This article has been peer reviewed.

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