Baumanian Perspective on Translation Sociology: A Non-Essentialist Reading of Orhan Pamuk’s A Strangeness in My Mind as the Representation of the Other

Translation sociology has been constructed and evolved with the contribution of interdisciplinary studies. While drawing on the works of various sociologists, little attention has been paid to the sociology of Zygmunt Bauman to conduct interdisciplinary research in the field of translation studies. This article considers the possibility of adopting Bauman’s sociological perspective to understand translational phenomena, particularly through his methodological conceptualization of ‘defamiliarization’. Applicability of his theory in translation research was tested in this study through the analysis of the novel A Strangeness in My Mind by the Nobel prize winner Turkish writer, Orhan Pamuk. As part of the research in translation sociology, the analyses involved both the agents of the translation process and the textual analysis of the cultural content of the book. The cultural elements in the original novel were detected according to Aixela’s (1996) definition of the culture specific items and their translations in A Strangeness in My Mind were examined in terms of defamiliarization. Additionally, the translator’s and the publisher’s approaches to defamiliarization were analyzed using Bourdieu’s concept of the ‘habitus’. The aim of these analyses was to examine the reflections of defamiliarization in the approaches of the translator and the publishing house as well as in the translated work itself considering that Bauman finds defamiliarization necessary in order to comprehend the ambivalence and the difference of the Other. Results of the study reveal that although the habitus of the publisher aligns with Bauman’s approach to defamiliarization, both the translator’s habitus and her translation approach indicate dispositions to create a familiarizing effect on the target readers more than defamiliarization.