I am Mirza Tazegül. All the writings on this site were written in Turkish; the original is Turkish, and it is mine.
I wanted to bring my writings to the reader in ten languages: English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Arabic, Japanese and the two scripts of Chinese. I do this without a publishing house or a translation agency, through a system I have set up myself. I also want to explain openly how I do it.
In translation and in review, within a single project, I make methodical use of three different advanced AI systems: one translates, one reviews, and another carries out the final check before publication. But I do not feed a piece of writing into a machine and publish whatever comes out. For each work, a translation constitution is written first; this constitution is often many, many times longer than the writing itself. In the constitution it is set down which wording was chosen and why, which repetition is deliberate, which idiom does what job, which word must never be confused with another word: all of these go through my decisions with meticulous care. When necessary, hours are spent going back to a single sentence; the texts are taken up again, and the corrected sentence or sentences are read again together with their neighbouring sentences.
Then the text is also analysed through the target language’s own grammar. The time and place of events, the order of scenes, tenses, forms of address, who says what to whom, idioms and cultural patterns are taken up one by one. A verb form or a form of address that sits naturally in Turkish can change the meaning or the harshness in another language; that is why a separate decision is made for each language. Whether an idiom calls up something else in that language, and how a word is read in that country’s language today, are also looked at. Sticking points are resolved by turning to that language’s own sources; when necessary, dozens of sources are looked at.
After that, every translation goes through a review separate from the one that made the translation. Both translation and review are bound by written protocols. The review is carried out using three separate methods: the text is read through the eyes of a translator, an editor and a proofreader, each separately; it is also read in the opposite direction, that is, back again towards Turkish; and it is first read in that language alone, without looking at the Turkish, and then compared with the Turkish sentence by sentence. It is measured whether the meaning, the order of events and the tone of the wording have been lost or have shifted. Every error found and every correction made is recorded.
My aim is to make the voice, the rhythm and the concern of the writing heard in the language it has been translated into as well. I work to be able to convey literature’s wholeness of meaning, and the depth of thought and of philosophy, fully in the language of the translation. Every piece of writing goes through final approval on the principle that it must read as if it had been written in the language it has been translated into.
Only after this intense labour does a piece of writing become ready to go out into the world. Behind every translation there is a method, a record and a person responsible. The person responsible is me: no translation is published without my approval.
This text and the subtitles of the video were also translated in the same way. Thank you for your interest.