Winnie-the-Pooh in Turkish

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Pooh’un Misafirliğe Gittiği ve Bir Yere Sıkıştığı
İKİNCİ BÖLÜM
А. А. Мilne
Çeviren Gökçen Ezber

Winnie-the-Pooh in Turkish Language
A Translation of A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh
Translated by Gökçen Ezber
Winnie-the-Pooh is the most popular children's book in the world. Turkish is a language read and spoken by two hundred million people worldwide.
Turkish is a relatively young language. It's spread began only relatively recently, only about one thousand years ago. As a result, it has not diversified as much as other languages. Those who speak Turkish can converse without much difficulty with anybody from the Turkish speaking areas. These areas cut a wide path from south-eastern Europe West of Istanbul up to Northeastern Russia. The Xinjiang Province of China, the largest province of China by land area, is Turkic speaking.
The Turkic languages are a language family of at least thirty-five languages, spoken by Turkic peoples from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean to Siberia and Western China. The Turkic languages originated in a region of East Asia spanning Western China to Mongolia, where Proto-Turkic is thought to have been spoken, according to one estimate, around 2,500 years ago, from where they expanded to Central Asia and farther west during the first millennium.
Turkish is NOT an Indo-European Language. Turkic languages are spoken as a native language by some 170 million people, and the total number of Turkic speakers, including second-language speakers, is over 200 million. The Turkic language with the greatest number of speakers is Istanbul Turkish, spoken mainly in Anatolia and the Balkans, the native speakers of which account for about 40% of all Turkic speakers.
Characteristic features of Turkish, such as vowel harmony, agglutination, and lack of grammatical gender, are universal within the Turkic family. There is also a high degree of mutual intelligibility among the various Oghuz languages, which include Turkish, Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Qashqai, Gagauz, Balkan Gagauz Turkish, and Oghuz-influenced Crimean Tatar.
The Soviets and their predecessors greatly feared that the Turkic speaking peoples would become united and overthrow them, so under the divide and conquer principle they created different alphabets for all the different varieties of Turkish spoken in the Soviet Union. Of the 15 republics of the Soviet Union, five were speaking essentially the same language, based on Turkish. Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Kirghizia, Turkmenia and Uzbekistan all basically spoke the same language. The Yakuts, who live in the Sakha Republic in NorthEastern Siberia bordering on the Arctic Ocean, also speak a Turkic language.
If you are in Europe and speak an Indo-European Language, if you go one hundred miles in almost any language you have to start speaking a different language. However, if you are in a Turkic area, you can go one thousand miles or even four thousand miles from Istanbul to Ürümqi and still be speaking Turkish all the time.
The Soviets and their Russian predecessors feared these people would all get together and start speaking and writing the same language, so the Soviets taught them all different alphabets based on Cyrillic. Now that the Soviet Union no longer exists, many of these people are starting to write their languages in the Turkish alphabet, while others still use the Cyrillic alphabet. Turkey however had not helped Turkey has been trying to purify their own language by eliminating loan words, principally loan-words based on English, and substituting them with original invented Turkish based words. As a result, the young people of Turkey today who have learned these new words cannot understand their elders who are still speaking the old words.
This translation of this book into Turkish is by Gökçen Ezber. This is not an original translation but is based on an older translation. Gökçen Ezber has written several books in Turkish. There is a Wikipedia for Turkish at https://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/
We would like to hope that this little bear, Winnie-the-Pooh, can bring peace and unity to the language to the region.
Turkish has no gender, so a translater might translate a sentence Pooh took his head out of the hole or Pooh took her head out of the hole or Pooh took the head out of the hole. These are not errors in translation but simply the way the language works.
Turkish is one of the best languages to learn. It is one of the easiest languages to learn the lack of any gender one of the things that makes easier. Also it is one of the most useful. I spent one month in Kashgar in the Xinjiang Province of China in January 1985 being the first European person to be allowed to enter Kashgar in more than one hundred years since the Yarkand Commission sent by the British in 1880. There, I learned some Uyghur which is a Turkish based language. I learned enough that I was able to go to the market in Kashgar where you can buy a camel. I bought a bicycle there for 90 yuan. I rode the bicycle every day for a month. When I was ready to leave Kashgar and go back, I went back to the same market and sold my bicycle for 80 yuan, only 10 yuan less. So I got to ride a bicycle for a month for only ten yuan.
I have been using what I learned ever since. When I go to the markets in Central Beijing, I find many of the traders and merchants there speaking Uyghur. My Chinese friends are astounded when they see me haggling with them, as the Chinese do not know their language. Then, here in New York City, when I go to the New Chinatown on Main Street Flushing Queens, I see the Uyghurs selling stuff on the street here too. My Chinese girlfriend was really surprised to see me talking Uyghur to them, a language totally foreign to Han Chinese.
This translation of Winnie-the-Pooh follows the original book closely, but does add the translator's own minor variations.
The purpose of this book is to help Turkish speakers learn English and to help English speakers learn Turkish. To have a translation as close as possible to the original is the most useful. The name for Winnie-the-Pooh in Turkish is Pooh. The Rabbit is Tavşan. Christopher Robin is still Christopher Robin.
Ishi Press has reprinted translations of Winnie-the-Pooh into 29 languages thus far. We have published it in Armenian, Bengali, Bulgarian, Chinese, Croatian, Danish, Dutch, Esperanto, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Korean, Persian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Turkish, Yiddish, Hindi, Urdu, Khowar, Kalasha and Latin. We have six more languages lined up, including Japanese and Latvian.
This translation into Turkish is part of project to translate Winnie-the-Pooh into other languages. The idea is children need to learn to read at an early age and the best way to teach them to read is to provide reading materials that they find interesting. Children around the world laugh when they see Winnie-the-Pooh saying and doing silly things. Since Winnie-the-Pooh is the most popular children's book world-wide, translating this book into the different languages of the world will be conducive to teaching children to read in those languages.
Translations are always difficult. A word in any language will almost never have exactly the same meaning in another language. For example, at the beginning of the English Language original of Winnie-the-Pooh, on the third page there is the following sentence, “He came to a sandy bank and in the bank was a large hole.”
Now you may be wondering, “Was that because somebody has robbed the bank?” Of course, you know the answer. The bank has not been robbed. But if your translator is somebody not familiar with the banking system, he may not provide the proper translation to this sentence.
We are not translating the entire book. We are only translating Chapter 2, which is the most interesting, most popular and shortest chapter. Winnie-the-Pooh is based on the most popular children's character in the world. Part of the reason for this is Winnie-the-Pooh was based on an actual living bear in the London Zoo named Winnie. Christopher Robin is the name of a real person who was the son of the original author, A. A. Milne. The son had a teddy bear he liked to carry around with him he named Winnie-the-Pooh.
Winnie-the-Pooh is perhaps unique for a children's book in that it is based on real people and historical events. Christopher Robin was a real person. As a child, he had a teddy bear he named “Winnie-the-Pooh”. The bear was named after a real bear in the London Zoo named Winnie. Winnie had been found in the forest near Winnipeg, Canada. His owner had brought him to England and eventually had donated him to the London Zoo.
Because this book is about real people and events, this places the book in a different legal position than other children's books with cartoon characters such as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck which are purely the inventions of their creators. The real original Winnie-the-Pooh teddy bear is now on display at the New York Public Library Children's Room on 42nd Street at Fifth Avenue. Elvis cannot be copyrighted because Elvis was a real person, so anybody can write their own stories about Elvis, although you cannot copy somebody else's story. This has helped spread the popularity of Winnie-the-Pooh.

[Osman]