ABSTRACT
This chapter is an autobiographical reflection on my life as an activist translator and writer. In 1971, when I was 12, I attended a British high school that was established in Istanbul in 1855. I became involved in left-wing activism at the age of 15. In 1980, a military coup brought about a suspension of democracy. At the age of 21, I was imprisoned for my activism. When I was released I discovered feminism. Most of the books we could access were in English. At that time, only the privileged among us could speak or read any European language. Few of the women who founded the second wave of feminism in Turkey enjoyed this privilege. During the early 1990s I started to attend feminist conferences in Eastern Europe. In one of the pamphlets I came across a notice stating: ‘Official language: Broken English.’ In perhaps unintended ways, these words seemed symptomatic of my condition. In the mid-1990s, I began to question the imperialistic modes of dominance in the realm of language, including the idea of English as the ‘norm’ and ‘official language.’ The tension between my political convictions and my translational activism is the subject of this essay.
