Creativity in Translation: Towards a Classification of Transcreation

Abstract

Transcreation, now burgeoning in cross-cultural communications like international advertising and marketing campaigns, is a frequently-adopted approach to literary translation and has been practised across the continents from Britain to the USA and from India to Brazil, producing such masters as Edward FitzGerald, Ezra Pound, Tagore, P. Lal and Haroldo de Campos, whose numerous transcreations are worth classifying so that training modules can be better designed for student translators and practitioners. For these people, the time is ripe to take a transcreational turn as they face huge challenges from AI-driven machine translation. After ploughing through many instances, this research classifies transcreation into two types: one with a source text and the other without. The former is sometimes called transwriting since it involves writing in addition to translation. The latter is found to be almost the same as writing or copywriting. The only difference is that the departure point of transcreation without a source text is translation while that of writing or copywriting is not. The skopos theory is used to explain the way transcreation is practised in both literary and nonliterary fields. The implications of this classification for translation teaching and translator training are also illustrated.