Cultural Incommensurability in the Turkification of Technological Terms

In the early 1980s, I took part in a programme on Turkish-language education at TRT alongside Oktay Haşim Sinanoğlu. After the programme we sat down to dinner, and the conversation deepened. He believed that the natural sciences should be taught in Turkish. I, for my part, was troubled by the nonsensical translations I had seen in the textbooks of friends who studied in Turkish — troubled that they took those translations to be the natural order of things. For that reason, I opposed a fully Turkish-medium education.

My Turkish-language teacher from my high-school years, the late Güngör Dural — who had a profound influence on me both linguistically and culturally — used to say, "Language is a tool," and that phrase became my motto. At the end of a talk I gave at Galatasaray University on internet-based television technologies, an academic sitting at the back criticised me for using English terms throughout my presentation. Knowing the French-English tension well, I told him, "If I knew French, I would have used that too." Because the issue was not which language a word belonged to; it was whether the cultural and technical context that word carried could be conveyed accurately.

Unlike the late Yurtsan Atakan, I never turned the question of Turkification into a lifelong cause. I even made subtle jokes about it in conversation. Yet I was particularly bothered — especially during the 1990s and 2000s, when the internet was on the rise in Turkey — by CEOs like Süreyya Ciliv taking the stage and translating terms however they pleased, saying things like "My daughter called this term such-and-such, and that one so-and-so." The rendering of "internet" as "sanal âlem" (virtual realm) was the last straw.

Because the issue was not about translating a word; a mistranslation would, after a while, construct the very concept incorrectly. If you call "cyberspace" a virtual realm, a reporter will run a headline like "The setting is virtual, the crime is real." And just like that, the logic of the concept collapses.

It turned out I was not the only one troubled by this. The meaning that the word "avantgarde" — used in decoration — acquired in Turkey was a similar story. The French-origin "avant-garde" had migrated from a military term into the world of culture and art, where it was used to mean "pioneering" and "innovative." In Turkey, however, it had drifted in the furniture sector to mean "showy and over-the-top." Most likely a furniture dealer, unable to recall the word "extravagant," marketed their products as "avantgarde," and others followed suit. The TDK (Turkish Language Association) even added this incorrect meaning to its dictionary.

It was precisely at this point that a concept I heard in a talk by Emrah Safa Gürkan showed me the real issue: cultural incommensurable — that is, the inability of a concept from one culture to find an exact equivalent in another. What Americans call the "White House," we call "Beyaz Saray" (White Palace), because in our tradition a head of state resides not in a house but in a palace. For Ottoman pashas, dancing with a partner at a ball was incomprehensible; in their minds it was coded as something like dancing with a concubine.

The problem I had been observing for years was, in fact, this: I was not opposed to Turkification itself, but to the infiltration of a meaning gap from another culture into the concept during the process of Turkification. In other words, as the word changed, the meaning broke.

I wish the late Oktay Sinanoğlu were sitting across from me now, so I could tell him: "Turkification is fine, but one must be careful about the problem of cultural incommensurability." Because translating a word is easy — but carrying a culture across accurately is still the hardest task of all.