Multilingual issues in the translation of Jack Kerouac’s Satori in Paris into Turkish

The present study focuses on the Turkish translation of Jack Kerouac’s Satori in Paris to discuss translation strategies for multilingual elements in the work and their impact on the representation of Kerouac’s bilingual identity and connection to the Beat generation in Turkish. It benefits from Grutman’s (1998) definition of literary multilingualism and Corrius and Zabalbeascoa’s (2011) third language model (L3) to analyze translated multilingual segments in three categories: (1) Kerouac’s translation of French into English, (2) Kerouac’s translation of English into French, and (3) slang and puns with a mixture of English and French. The findings indicate that multilingual segments in Kerouac’s work were mostly transferred to the target text through repeating and/or adapting, while a small portion of them was lost in the translation process due to various linguistic constraints among English, French and Turkish. The translator’s tendency to maintain an overwhelming percentage of multilingual segments in Turkish text can be associated with the respectable status of American literature in Turkey and historical significance of French as a dominant source language in literary translations since the 1930s.