The analysis of the culture-specific items in Roberta Rich’s The Harem Midwife and in its Turkish translation within the framework of watermark translation and retro-translation

Abstract In The Harem Midwife , set in 16th-century Constantinople, American author Roberta Rich presents Ottoman culture from a Western perspective. As a foreign writer depicting the Ottoman world, Rich’s portrayal reflects a mental translation of cultural elements, shaped by her own understanding of the foreign culture. This mental translation process is examined through Sündüz Öztürk Kasar’s concept of watermark translation, which refers to the subtle traces of translation embedded in a text when an author writes about a culture she does not directly belong to. This study aims to explore how these cultural references are transferred and transformed both in the source and target texts within the framework of Aixela's strategies for translating Culture-Specific Items (CSIs). This analysis highlights the strategies used to convey Ottoman life and examines the writer and translator’s role in mediating these elements for English and Turkish readers. The most commonly employed strategies by the watermark translator include transliteration, intra-gloss strategy, extra-gloss strategy, repetition, linguistic translation, and limited universalization. In contrast, retro-translators tend to rely more on strategies such as naturalization, deletion, repetition, and autonomous creation. Ultimately, this study emphasizes the importance of conducting comparative analysis within the context of watermark translation and retro-translation to understand how cultural elements transform.