Amargi Dergi

The translation process of Amargi Feminist Journal has been a collective work of a voluntary group, who are also Amargi readers. The process started in 2008 when 3 young interns in Amargi Women’s Academy -the feminist organization in İstanbul- came up with an idea of translating some articles from the journal into English so that it could reach out to more people, especially to those who are concerned with women’s situation in Turkey. They thought the journal opened up rich and exciting discussions on the grounds of feminism and these should be carried to international level, as well.

After having formed the baseline of the idea, they released it to the members and friends of Amargi Feminist Academy to support the process. That’s how we became a group of women who collectively translated articles from Turkish to English for the first 13 issues of the journal. The reason for that is there had been 13 issues brought out at that time.

We chose articles from each issue, which we believed to be interesting for foreigners. We shared the articles among ourselves evenly and once somebody translated an article, somebody else revised it. While translating, we paid specific attention to our expression and the terms we used in order for them not to be male-dominated, discriminative, orientalistic, etc. Apart from organizing the practical things, we also had meetings discussing the content and the method of our work. We had discussions on our use of language and at the same time, tried to maintain the unique expression of each feminist writer of the journal. That’s how we worked on nearly 50 articles in a few years’ time. We might have aimed too much for a totally amateur work; however, we gained a great deal of experience and invaluable friendships during the process. Despite the obstacles of voluntary work, we enjoyed the collective soul of our work and tried our best to reach our aims.

Since the process has been a complete voluntary work, it has taken more time than expected to release the translations. Now, we are happy to share with you the fruits of our collective work. We hope that this work will reach to activists, students, academics, to anybody concerned. You might see the names of women who have put their effort in organizing and completing the process.

In solidarity,

Begüm Acar, Begüm Başdaş, Beliz Baldil, Birce Pakkan, Cansu Karamustafa, Emek Ayşe Yıldız, Feride Eralp, Gizem Darendelioğlu, Gül Varlı, Hilal Özçetin, Kıvanç Tanrıyar, Miray Çakıroğlu, Murçe Nefise Kahraman, Senem Kaptan, Yelda Şahin Akıllı