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Abstract
This article presents a case study of text production at the intersection of maternity care services and medical ethics. It examines the role of translation in web-based material promoting non-medicalized, natural birth in Turkey, and has three main objectives: to demonstrate the variety of the media and mediators through which new ideas travel; to investigate what “modernity” might entail in diverse, often contentious contexts; and to highlight the fuzzy boundaries of translation as used in cyberactivism. The study picks up certain themes, such as the foreign, power, choice and time, to explicate the context and translational decisions underlying the text production on a website promoting natural birth. It also points out some incongruities and anachronisms in relation to “modernity” and birth within Turkey in order to locate the text production at hand within its real-life context.
Notes
1. I am aware that “modernity” may mean different things to different people. Within the context I have studied, maternity services in present-day Turkey, this is certainly the case; hence the title of the article. Throughout the text, I will use the term as a short-cut to its various connotations, both positive and negative: contemporary, desirable, up-to-date, fashionable, untraditional, advanced, technologized, novel, etc.
2. www.aims.org.uk (accessed 25 December 2009).
3. www.nice.org.uk/nicemedia/pdf/CG55FullGuideline.pdf. For a considerably different definition of “normal” birth, see the practical guide of the World Health Organization: whqlibdoc.who.int/hq/1996/WHO_FRH_MSM_96.24.pdf (accessed 25 December 2009).
4. www.tumgazeteler.com/?a=4193666 (accessed 25 December 2009).
5. One would obviously need to subtract my visits to the site for the purposes of this research.
6. Personal correspondence with Serhat Baysan, Director of the Publishers' Association (6 October 2009). There are no official figures available.
7. -miş and its variants -mIş, -muş and -müş are added to a verb root “to indicate reported past action that the speaker has not witnessed, but has got to know through an intermediary which is not necessarily a person” (Rona Citation1992, 112).
8. See the birth stories on www.dogaldogum.com/dogaldogum/id6.htm (accessed 25 December 2009) as well as the relevant media events advertised on the home page.
9. See “Işte suda doğum anI” [Here is the moment of birth in water] (2008). All back-translations from Turkish are mine.
10. From “Lamaze International position paper – Lamaze for the 21st century” [2009].
11. It is interesting to note that in his translation of Lamaze's “Philosophy of pregnancy”, which is more or less a mirror image of and is presented on the same page as Lamaze's “Philosophy of birth” (Text 11), Dr Çoker does use “güçlendirir” (empowers) in the final entry. The main text that accompanies and frames the lists, “Lamaze for the 21st century”, also has many references to women's strength, which are more or less uniformly translated into Turkish.
12. In back-translation: “Birth should be left to the baby and the body, which is under the control of the unconscious, as they already know what to do. An environment conducive for them to work in harmony and without any external interference should be offered to each and every family” (source text unknown).
13. See arsiv.sabah.com.tr/2004/09/29/gun101.html and www.takvim.com.tr/2004/10/04/pap107.html (both accessed 25 December 2009).