FEATURED NEOLOGISM:

My favourite neologism is “troll” (English original / Turkish adapted: trol, troller, trollemek). The English noun troll, originally used in online forums to describe users who deliberately provoke or disrupt discussions, has been borrowed into Turkish as trol. From this borrowed noun, Turkish has productively derived the verb trollemek through verbal suffixation (-le- + -mek) and through pluralisation (trol-ler), fully integrating the term into Turkish morphology. The neologism entered Turkish in the early 2010s with the expansion of social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. Beyond everyday online interaction, it has become firmly established in Turkish political discourse, where troller and trollemek are commonly used to refer to organised or strategic online manipulation, propaganda, or harassment practices. This neologism is particularly interesting because it illustrates how a global digital-media term is localised and semantically expanded in Turkish, especially in political communication, such as in this example and this example.

I am an Assistant Professor in Translation Studies, working primarily on Turkish–English and English–Turkish translation with a focus on audiovisual media. My academic background combines translation studies, media studies and language pedagogy. I was a Fulbright scholar in Teaching Turkish as a Foreign Language, and my MA thesis examined Turkish language teaching, which continues to inform my interest in language contact, meaning transfer and lexical adaptation across languages. In my current research, I analyse translations in the Turkish-English language pair in audiovisual content, viewing AVT as a particularly productive site for investigating contemporary discourse, social media language, and culturally situated lexical choices. This perspective aligns with ENEOLI’s interest in how new expressions circulate across languages and how translation mediates their interpretation and uptake in different linguistic and cultural contexts. The link to my academic webpage.