Introducing the Turkish Editorial Team
August 07, 2017
We became the Turkish editorial team of Global Dialogue (GD) in January 2015. Our team comprises a core of two, Gül Çorbacıoğlu and Irmak Evren, both PhD candidates at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. Our friend, Ahmet Seyhan Totan, has also been helping out with the design of our issues.
Keeping up with the latest sociological debates throughout the world and being able to translate them into Turkish bring us joy but it is also a challenging endeavor and a rather long process. It is more than a project of translation – we have to transform the (English) Global Dialogue into the (Turkish) Küresel Diyalog, attending to the coherence and integrity of the entire magazine. The whole process starts from the moment we receive the English texts for a new issue of GD. First of all, we divide up the articles – when there is a cluster of articles on a specific issue, or one that covers the scope of a specific country’s sociology, we take the interrelation of the articles into consideration – according to our fields of interest and to maximize our own individual enrichment. Then we work hard to meet the deadline. As a team of two it requires tenacity as well as responsibility!
When each of us is finished with the translation of the assigned articles, we exchange them so that we will have read all the articles as well as translated and edited them. We believe that a second review, as a reader rather than a translator, makes it possible to view the magazine from the standpoint of the audience – the community of sociologists and those who are interested in sociology. When we encounter terms that seem impossible to translate into Turkish, fearing that they would lose their meaning if we make a literal conversion, we study the relevant literature in Turkish and consult our professors, to see if the term has perhaps been coined recently and if not, how we might translate it. Where we think it appropriate, we make use of the very colorful landscape of Turkish proverbs and idioms. After translating everything, including the captions for the pictures, we send all the texts to our friend Seyhan, who is an expert in the techniques of design. When the layout is complete, we make a final check. Finally, we are proud to behold a new issue of Küresel Diyalog!
As soon as it is posted on ISA’s website, we spread the word to our communities, to our colleagues in the universities and to special interest groups who are eager to link the familiar and the strange in their quest for global sociology. Translating Global Dialogue into Turkish has introduced both of us to new issues and societies, and, with every new issue, we happily share our excitement and enthusiasm with the Turkish sociological community.
Irmak Evren received her BSc in Economics and Management from Istanbul Bilgi University and London School of Economics and Political Science. She then continued her graduate studies in Economics at Université Paris 1 – Panthéon Sorbonne, France and Media and Communication Studies at Galatasaray University, Istanbul. Currently, she is pursuing her doctoral degree in Sociology at Middle East Technical University, Ankara, on Islamophobia and transnational religious organizations of Turkish-Muslim migrants in France. She is also an instructor in the Cinema and Television Department at Okan University, Istanbul.
Gül Çorbacıoğlu received her BA degree in International Relations from Bilkent University, Ankara, and her MSc degree in Sociology from Middle East Technical University, Ankara. She is pursuing her doctoral degree in Sociology at the same university. Her dissertation is on the transformation of professional autonomy and authority of the Turkish medical profession. She conducted part of this research as a Visiting Researcher at the Sociology Department of the University of York, UK. Currently, she is also an instructor at the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at Bilkent University. She’s interested in medical sociology, sociology of professions, sociology of work and organization, and gender studies.
Gül Çorbacıoğlu, Middle East Technical University, Turkey <gulcorbacioglu@gmail.com>
Irmak Evren, Middle East Technical University, Turkey <irmakevrenn@gmail.com>