Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
The 11th International Conference on Language, Literature & Culture: "Humanities in the Digital Age", Batman, Türkiye, 17 Ekim 2025, ss.40, (Özet Bildiri)
Drawing on theoretical frameworks from posthumanism and the digital humanities, this paper offers a comparative analysis of human and machine translations of The Romance of the Harem (1839) by Julia Pardoe, an English writer whose travels to the Ottoman Empire informed some of her most widely read works, including The City of the Sultan and Domestic Manners of the Turks (1837). Pardoe’s The Romance of the Harem, a fictionalized yet heavily ethnographic narrative steeped in orientalist tropes, was translated into Turkish by Hasan Kaya and published by Profil Kitap in 2011. This study juxtaposes Kaya’s human translation with a machine-generated translation produced using the AI-based system ChatGPT, seeking to interrogate how orientalist discourse is mediated, sustained, or transformed across translation modalities. The analysis unfolds in three stages: first, it situates The Romance of the Harem within the tradition of orientalist travel writing; second, it examines the discursive and stylistic features of Kaya’s Turkish rendition; third, it evaluates the translation produced by ChatGPT in light of the same criteria. Particular attention is paid to how orientalist representations of Ottoman culture, manifest in semantic, syntactic, and lexical choices, are either faithfully reproduced, softened, intensified, or obscured in each translation. By exploring the translational strategies employed by both human and machine agents, this paper aims to assess the role of AI in the ideological transmission of literary texts. Hence, it seeks to contribute to ongoing debates in literary translation studies by considering how digital translation tools can be critically situated within posthumanist understandings of authorship, agency, and textual mediation.