Abstract:
Many new media technologies seem to have played a certain role in introducing
different cultures, traditions and lifestyles. Although of the oldest, television and its
programs remain among the most vastly used. While a documentary is a television
program that presents a country with little or no fiction, the case is not the same
when it comes to soap operas. The action, fiction and their characters make people
watch more eagerly. Once they enter a country there follows a flow difficult to stop,
with some of them even garnering the highest rating ever received by a television
program. Whether they have been produced to achieve this aim or to make immense
profits is not the main concern of this article. This study aims to explore reasons
for the popularity of Turkish soap operas (Albanian case), which have since 2008
become popular not only in the Middle East but also in most Balkan countries. The
objectives of this study were achieved through review of articles in newspapers
and magazines, and an analysis of a survey conducted in Tirana, the capital city
of Albania. Regarding the fact that they are subtitled and not dubbed in the case
country, this research also aimed to explore whether watching soap operas helps to
learn/improve a language(when the viewer already knows some Turkish), or arouses
viewers’ interest towards it(when the viewer doesn’t know any Turkish at all).
