Speaker
Description
Ecology has become a key issue across Translation and Adaptation Studies, reflecting how culture mediates environmental crisis. Bassnett and Johnston (2019) argue that translation needs to move “beyond the linguistic” toward a planetary perspective, engaging other disciplines and reshaping global communication. Similarly, Cronin (2017) defines “eco-translation” as practice that responds to human-induced environmental change. This aligns with Geal’s (2022) call for “an ecocritical turn in adaptation studies”, where narratives “mutate, survive, and reconfigure their environments”. This study explores the circulation of ecological crisis and ontological uncertainty across translation and adaptation through Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation (2014), its Turkish translation Yok Oluş (2018), and its film adaptation (2018). These works are interpreted as interconnected acts of rewriting the Earth, examining how language, perception, and ecology translate one another within the Anthropocene. Adopting Cronin’s (2019) view that “translation offers a way of thinking about new forms of subjectivity in the age of the Anthropocene”, the paper argues that Annihilation reveals the limits of translation when confronting the nonhuman, an unstable condition where cognition, language, and ecology merge. Using “uncertain ontologies” (Ameel & Caracciolo, 2020), it shows how literature, translation, and adaptation function as ecological agents rewriting language and human existence in a destabilized world. Based on Gentzler’s Post-Translation Studies approach, asserting that “all writing is rewriting”, the analysis follows three stages: the novel as ecological rewriting, the Turkish translation as interlingual transformation, and the film as intersemiotic adaptation. Through these forms, the study traces the dynamic movement between human and nonhuman consciousness. The research reframes translation as an ecological act, revealing how crisis, language, and ontology evolve across media.
| Keywords | eco-translation, adaptation, ontological uncertainty, rewriting, ecological crisis. |
|---|---|
| saziyecikrikci@iuc.edu.tr |