Literary Transmission of Cultural Features (CFs) in Bestsellers: A Case Study on Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

Elizabeth Gilbert is an award-winning writer who has both fiction and nonfiction books. Her short-story collection Pilgrims was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway award, and her bestseller, Stern Men, was a New York Times Notable Book. Her book The Last American Man, published in 2002, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Moreover, she is also the author of the New York Times hardcover bestseller Committed: A Sceptic Makes Peace with Marriage. In 2008, Time magazine named Gilbert one of the hundred most influential people in the world. This case study aims to descriptively investigate cultural features in literary translations of Elizabeth Gilbert’s bestseller, Eat Pray Love (2006). The primary objective of this study is to contribute to the understanding of cultural features (CFs) of the bestsellers. The mixed method approach was employed using these features in the source material: domestication and foreignization strategies of Javier Franco Aixelá (1996) and Lawrence Venuti (1995), skopos theory of Hans Vermeer (2000), and classification of translation strategies of Eirlys E. Davies (2003) were used in the analysis process. This study also aims to underline the shifting effects of translation strategies on the transmission of the source text (ST) through the target text (TT) in the case of Turkish-to-English translation of cultural CFs in the bestsellers. The main question of the study is whether using different translation strategies in addressing CFs affects the meaning of the ST while delivering it through the TT or not. In this study, the stylistic aspect was identified by focusing on a bestseller. It was determined that an applied cultural substitution strategy inevitably has a direction toward the target culture’s reader in the transmission of artistic features. They were further discussed, examined, and categorized within the framework of domesticating and foreignizing. In conclusion, several recommendations regarding the translation of bestselling books were proposed, emphasizing that the translations of bestselling books as popular fiction will constitute an extremely important and productive field of study for translation scholars in the future.