Saturday, September 16, 2017

Creativity in Translation

I'm currently very interested in the whole area of creativity, especially as manifested by literary translators. I'm therefore reading various articles on translatorial creativity and, more generally, on creativity studies which analyze and try to explain the origins and nature of human creativity within the arts, science, academia and so on, from philosophical and psychological standpoints. I'm also researching the ways in which some contemporary translators of Verne into English have shown unique, individual creativity. 
The purposes of such research are twofold: it is being conducted firstly for an article on translation of the classics which I'm writing and, secondly, for a future monograph on creativity in translation . 
Within translation studies, scholars such as Boase-Beier and Delisle have written on the ways in which translating is a creative process. Outside the specific confines of the discipline of Translation Studies, an excellent collection of seminal articles on creativity studies is the 1976 book The Creativity Question edited by Rothenberg and Hausman, published by Duke University Press. I've also recently come across an interesting article by an ESL Lecturer in the Middle East who discusses how we might evaluate creative writing by English language students, and her assessment rubrics and criteria are, I feel, usefully applicable to assessing translators' creative outputs. 
For me, translation - especially literary, including poetic translation - is creative by definition, as transferring a text inter-lingually from one language and culture to another involves, not code-switching, but trying to represent the source text in the different worldview of the target language and culture. Translators therefore are obliged to solve problems at every turn, coming up with inventive synonymy, explication, non-imitative renderings, cultural equivalences and individual interpretations. They are unavoidably saying something different to the original. Poetry translation is probably the most creative genre of translating activity, but all genres of text in translation require creative translating. 
For my article and later monograph, I'm interested in how contemporary renderings in English of Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas demonstrate varying individual creative solutions by the problem-solving, inventive translators, and in how translators of other Verne novels, as well as translations of J.K. Rowling, Lucy Maud Montgomery and the Grimm Brothers, and Verne as an adapter to the theatre among others, manifest creativity. 
In sum, translation may be more than Malmkjaer's 'derived creativity' - Jean Delisle and Jean Boase-Beier, among others, see translating as completely creative and original rather than somehow derivative or secondary. 
Models of the creative process - such as Wallas's model of creativity as entailing preparation, incubation, inspiration and revision - will be applied by me to the specific creative processes engaged in by literary translators. Creativity as part of the efficient cause of the individual translator's self-inscription on her translated text is the principal cause of translation forms. 
But what might cause creativity itself within human beings, creativity being defined as the production of something novel, original and valuable? Theories of the causes of creative products are both genetic and teleological in nature, and there are certain psychological attributes of creative people which have been advanced by certain theorists, and which have specifically been found to exist in translators, such as openness to experience, a concern for discovery, etc.
For me, an important part of creativity is divergent production, so that translators in their problem-solving can brainstorm a variety of original solutions. 

PS I have recently uploaded, to academia.edu, a draft article on Adaptation Studies. 

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