ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author presents ethnography as a valuable method for translation studies, suggesting that it allows scholars to capture narratives in practice, in all their complexity as much as possible, while understanding what these practices mean to subjects who engage in them. Translation became key concept in the research on queer politics in contemporary Turkey despite training in sociology. Most critically and productively, translation and ethnography meet in their refusal of the notion that textual and social meanings are fixed, uncomplicated, and directly accessible to the outside reader/observer. Ethnography helps expose the heterogeneity of "the local" and thus contributes to the breaking down of the source versus target language binary that translation studies scholars are working against. Using a case from her research that traces the travel and translation of escinsel haklari to the context of contemporary Turkey, the author argues that ethnography allows the tracing of the uneven and varied translations of this term.
