AN ANALYSIS OF THE TURKISH TRANSLATIONS OF DAUDET’S “LETTERS FROM MY WINDMILL”

French writer Alphonse Daudet’s 1869 novel “Letters From My Windmill” has been translated into Turkish a number of times by various translators. For this study, three different translations of the novel were picked and analyzed in order to unfold the similarities and differences between the source text and the target texts in the form of translation criticism. The aim of the study is to describe the translation strategies that the translators have utilized while transferring from the source language into the target language as well as to reveal their consequences. The translations analyzed in this study are evaluated within the frame of Gideon Toury’s translation theory that adopts a target-oriented approach.. In line with this approach, the closest translation to the original text is to be viewed as satisfactory while the farthest one is to be viewed as acceptable. Initially the cover pages, forewords, number of chapters and pages of all three translations are examined as the analyses of pre-process norm. Then sentences are selected from the source text and evaluated vis-à-vis their translations in these three target texts within the frame of Gideon Toury’s target-oriented translation theory and translation strategies. The results of the analysis has shown that the strategies that the three different translators use the most are paraphrase, addition, derogation, domestication, and borrowing. The translations have been found to naturally host differences. It has also been revealed that Translation 1 is satisfactory while Translations 2 and 3 are acceptable in accordance with Gideon Toury’s target-oriented translation theory.