THE AUTHOR'S VOICE
Plain, tidal, and withholding: the narrator states physical facts and lets the grief sit underneath them unnamed. Sentences are short and declarative; the emotional weight is carried by repetition (the stones, the waters, the jetty) rather than by adjectives.
REGISTER
Plain literary English, contemporary but unhurried. Do not raise the diction: where the Turkish is bare, the English stays bare. Never add an adjective the author withheld.
TENSE
Past throughout. Use the English habitual ("used to count", "would stop") where Turkish uses the -ardı imperfect for repeated childhood action — the repetition is the book's subject and must survive.
PERSON & DISTANCE
First person, retrospective, narrated from forty years later. Preserve the distance: the narrator reports the child's actions without explaining the child's feelings.
DIALECT & IDIOLECT
Unmarked working English. Convey the fishing town through objects and procedure, never through phonetic spelling or an imported regional accent.
CULTURE-SPECIFIC ITEMS
No footnotes. Render tools, boats and harbour procedure with the ordinary English terms a coastal reader would use. Keep Turkish proper names in their own spelling, diacritics intact.
PUNCTUATION & DIALOGUE
British conventions: double quotation marks for speech, a new paragraph per speaker, spaced em dashes for interruption. The source's guillemets become English quotation marks.
NAMES & HONORIFICS
Keep Turkish names and their spelling. Patronymic address ("Demir'in oğlu") becomes the natural English possessive, not a translation of the relationship.
CAUTIONS
- · "Sular çekilince" is the title and a refrain. Whatever rendering wins must be identical every time it appears — it is the book's spine, not a description of the tide.
- · "İskele" is a false friend for readers who know it as "scaffolding". Here it is the harbour jetty, and the ratified rendering fixes it.
- · The counted stones recur in both chapters. The counting verb must stay the same word so the reader hears the child in the old man.
- · Turkish leaves the agent unstated far more comfortably than English. Resist supplying a subject where the source withholds one — especially in "Kimse çıkanları konuşmadı".