In their contributions the authors reflect upon Levy s thinking on translation as a communication process and on Popovi? s insistence on the importance of re-creating a text both at the surface and deep levels. Examples are drawn from literary translation, technical translation, from audio-visual translation and from interpreting, and the authors point out that translators in all domains inevitably come up against linguistic, textual and other constraints, which, if they are to be resolved successfully, call upon a translator s and interpreter s strategies and creativity. The authors argue that this is the essence of professional decision-making in translation according to Levy translation is a decision-making process and that translation teachers should help students develop an understanding of translation strategies and of the vital role that creativity plays throughout the translation/interpreting process.

Translation requires a certain experience, a certain education and a substantial amount of talent. Translators must invest a considerable amount of time and skill to create a good and valuable translation. This work provides an analysis of the creative and normalizing strategies of the Czech and Slovak translations of Arundhati Roy s The God of Small Things. It studies and compares the normalizing and creative strategies of the two translators: Michaela Lauschmannová and Veronika Redererová. The work further compares the translator s attitudes to translation, language and creative passages of the source text. It also studies the influence of the shifts that occurred during the translation process, and studies the degree of their influence on the target text. Finally, it examines the transfer of all levels of meaning and all kinds of functions of the source text. The analysis should help to get a better understanding of the translation strategies and translators attitudes in order to improve one s own strategies and techniques when translating.

The increasing demand for popular literary works has given impetus to the issue of quality and acceptability in translation. In specific cases where the novels to be translated include different wordplays, codes, and symbols, the problem of quality and acceptability has become more challenging for translators due to the significant impact of these language-specific components on the plot and the technical linguistic limitations. This book aims to show different methods for overcoming this challenge in translation by elaborating on the theoretical aspects of “creativity” in translation and by analyzing the dimensions of this creativity through the examples selected from Dan Brown’s bestseller thriller novels. The book consists of three chapters. The first chapter gives detailed information on popular literature, its specific characteristics, subgenres, translational methods for popular literature, and creativity in translation. The second chapter focuses on the theoretical aspects of the issue of “creativity” in the translation of popular literature. Finally, the third chapter elaborates on numerous examples of wordplays, symbols, and codes for which translators have used their creative skills in the translation process. The significance of the creative interventions of translators is concretely demonstrated through the analysis of these examples. The methods and the examples of creativity discussed here will show the way for future translators of popular literary works to overcome the problem of the “untranslatability” of wordplays, codes, and symbols. This book will also be a valuable resource for academicians and translation students interested in literary translation, wishing to understand the challenges and learn different methods to overcome them.

Translation and Creativity discusses the links between translation and creative writing from linguistic, cultural, and critical perspectives, through eleven chapters by established academics and practitioners. The relationship between translation and creative writing is brought into focus by theoretical, pedagogical, and practical applications, complemented by language-based illustrative examples. Innovative research and practice areas covered include ideas of self-translation and the 'spaces' of reading, mental 'black boxes' and cognition and the book introduces new concepts of transgeneric translation, pop translation and orthographical translation.

Kirsten Malmkjær argues that translating can and should be considered a valuable art form. Examining notions of creativity and their relationship with translation and focusing on how the originality of translation is manifest in texts, the author explores a range of texts and their translations, in order to illustrate original as opposed to derivative translation. With reference to thirty translators’ discourses on their source texts and the author’s own experience of translating a short text, Malmkjær explores the theory of creativity, philosophical aesthetics, the philosophy of language, experimental and theoretical translation studies, and translators’ discourses on their work. Showing the relevance of these varied topics to the study of translating and translations underlines their complexity and the immensity of understanding that is regularly invested in translations. This work proposes a complete rethinking of the concepts of creativity and originality, as applied to translation, and is vital reading for advanced students and researchers in translation studies and comparative literature.

“I don’t translate, I create!” – This is the slogan of a translation agency called “Sternkopf Communications” located in Flöha, Germany. The translators at this translation agency are specialized in the field of marketing and perceive creativeness their daily bread. But what does this actually mean – I don’t translate, I create? Undoubtedly, the translation of a text from one language into another is not an easy and straightforward process. On the contrary, the translator needs to invest much time and one or the other headache before a target text (TT) finally sounds natural, fluent, coherent and logical for the target audience. Different possible translation solutions will have to be considered, language as well as culture-related equivalents often are not easily at hand etc. Would it not be pleasant if machine translation (MT) was there to help with this process? Nevertheless, as promising as this may sound, no machine or software developed so far is able to independently produce TTs meeting the standards of marketable translations, despite copious efforts to do so. This just goes to show how important the human capacity of creativity in language and text production is for the translation process. Without human creative thinking, TTs would, in fact, truly only read like translations, i.e. mechanical reproductions of the source text (ST) in a different code, rather than natural texts in their own right. Good translations, however, distinguish themselves by not revealing their readership that they are “merely” renderings of the original text. Hence, a slogan such as “I don’t translate, I create”, emphasizes the effort that is put into the translation process quite well, making the customers of Sternkopf Communications instantly aware of the fact that their texts are in good hands and will eventually not read like mechanical translations but as if they were well-composed originals. Yet, despite the enormous importance of creativity in translating, computer-aided translation (CAT) tools are being used frequently by professional translators, not to replace but to support the translator in their daily business. From the 1990s onwards, using CAT tools has been becoming increasingly popular for the following reason: They are said to help translators to achieve faster turnaround times by storing completed translations in a translation memory TM. In so doing, CAT tools enable their users to translate in a more consistent way, since they search source texts for words, phrases or sentences that have already been translated before and stored in the TM so that the translator does not need to translate this text unit again ‘from scratch’. Accordingly, this paper pursues two related purposes. The first is to compare the different CAT tools in their degree of usability to gain an impression of which of these translation memory solutions is perceived to meet translators’ technological requirements best. The second purpose is to identify translators’ perspectives on uniformity and creativity in translations with the goal to shedding light on the question whether CAT tools generally tend to positively or negatively influence the translation process on a rather linguistic than technological basis.

This book begins by investigating, through the use of think-aloud protocols, the mental processes of students when they translate. The creative and successful processes observed can be used directly for teaching purposes, while the unsuccessful ones can serve to find out where remedial training is needed. The book then goes on to discuss methods for improving a translator's competence. The strategies offered are based on the pragmatic and semantic analysis of texts from a functional point of view, and they include such practical matters as the use of dictionaries and the evaluation of translations and error analysis. The book is intended for teachers in translator-training institutions, but it can also be used by students for self-training.