Series OS — a writers' room that remembers

← Sular Çekilince

CH02 — İki — Dönüş

4 OF 6 ¶ RENDERED · 0 APPROVED

← Sular Çekilince

CH02 — İki — Dönüş

Turkish → English

4 OF 6 PARAGRAPHS RENDERED · 0 APPROVED← PREVIOUS

BOUND BY THE STYLE BIBLE AND EVERY RATIFIED TERM · APPROVED PARAGRAPHS ARE NEVER TOUCHED
THE ROUND TRIP COSTS TWO CALLS PER CHUNK — IT IS THE EXPENSIVE, HONEST CHECK

TURKISH — THE SOURCE

ENGLISH — THE TRANSLATION

CH02.001DRAFTED

Limana döndüğümde kırk yıl geçmişti ve iskele hâlâ oradaydı.

CH02.002DRAFTED

Daha kısaydı. Ya da ben büyümüştüm.

CH02.003DRAFTED

«Demir'in oğlu,» dedi biri arkamdan. Dönmedim.

CH02.004DRAFTED

Sular yine çekilmişti. Taşları saymadım.

CH02.005UNTRANSLATED

Kahvede oturanlar beni tanıdı ama selam vermediler; bu da bir tür selamdı.

CH02.006UNTRANSLATED

Akşam olduğunda iskelenin ucuna kadar yürüdüm ve kırk yıl önce durduğum yerde durdum.

TAKE IT OUT OF THE ROOM

⇩ MANUSCRIPT · WORD ⇩ MANUSCRIPT · MARKDOWN ⇩ BILINGUAL · MARKDOWN

2 OF 6 PARAGRAPHS ARE NOT YET RENDERED — THE EXPORT MARKS EACH ONE IN PLACE RATHER THAN CLOSING OVER IT

THE ROOM DRAFTS · ONLY YOUR APPROVAL MAKES IT THE BOOK

THIS CHAPTER

Paragraphs6

Rendered4

Approved0

Open notes0

Ratified terms3

THE CHARTER

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".