Translation has traditionally been considered a mechanical process, a simple and clean one-to-one exchange. But this isn’t true. The process of creating a good translation is complicated and very difficult. This essay will examine the elements of translation that either directly involve creativity or at least suggest the presence of it. I conducted an interview with Dr. Tomoko Takahashi, Provost & Vice President for Academic Affairs, Dean of the Graduate School, and Professor of Linguistics and Education at Soka University of America. Dr. Takahashi translated three of Mrs. Rosa Parks’ books: Rosa Parks: My Story, Quiet Strength, and Dear Mrs. Parks from English to Japanese, and is a widely respected translator of Japanese and English. I will refer to this interview from time to time as evidence and support for some of the research presented. Lastly, I will offer a research proposal for this area of study.
Creativity can be explained as new associations between different or similar ideas. Associations, as Aristotle conceived, are ideas that are connected or have associations with other ideas (Dacey & Lennon, 1998, p. 17). The creative person makes new associations between previously unconnected items. All individuals, creative or not, have associative hierarchies. The steepness of the hierarchy varies from person to person. The steeper the hierarchy, the fewer and less creative the responses one will have to a question or stimulus. A creative person has a mostly flat associative hierarchy which has a closer network of associations that yield a higher number of general and creative responses. These close associations are less strongly connected to stimulus. In contrast, remote associations, which are prevalent in vertical hierarchies, are more strongly connected to stimulus. (Martindale, 1999, p. 139) Translators need flat associations in order to have the flexibility necessary to find coherent translations for their target audience.
As alluded to above, translation is more than a one-to-one correspondence, it is a complicated transfer of meaning from 1 language to another (Encyclopedia, 2000, p. 185). Translation “enables a cooperative, adequate communication across cultural barriers.” A translator must translate the technical language of the source text and must also take into account the cultural context in which the source occurs. Overcoming the cultural barriers between the source language and the target language is a significant part of the “expert action” and is one of the most difficult aspects of translation (Encyclopedia, 2000, p. 3).
A translator is not an artist. The artist works in the midst of the “language forest,” whereas the translator is on the outside of the forest, working with the entirety of the language trying to produce an “echo of the original.” The process which the translator must implement is more intellectual, rationalizing, distanced, and less spontaneous, graphic and primary than original writing (Encyclopedia, 2000, p. 195).
The echo that the translator tries to produce is what is referred to as the “pure language” of the original. This is a “force,” a poetic potential, which is hidden in the text. It tries to surpass the immediate limit of words, it is the hidden harmony of all the modes of intention. The translator fulfills his/her mission when he/she successfully communicates the content and the pure language “element that doesn’t lend itself to translation” (Encyclopedia, 2000, p. 195).
Dr. Takahashi spoke about her experience of tapping into Mrs. Parks’ pure language as follows: When she was translating Mrs. Parks’ first book, she faced a translation problem (see footnote1), how to translate Mrs. Parks’ intention behind her specific word choice. A literal translation wouldn’t suffice in the least. Finally, she was able to translate her pure language when she understood the text “with her life.” She successfully translated Mrs. Parks’ voice because she understood her heart (T. Takahashi, personal communication, January 22, 2009). This is what pure language refers to, the concept that the words try to grasp, the intention, and with autobiographies, the experiences and life of the author all at once.
Ann Sullivan, Helen Keller’s teacher, was also able to transmit pure language to Helen. Sullivan exposed Helen to a series of experiences with water. Helen had some clue of similarities between them because Sullivan consistently scratched “water” into her hand. She realized the experiences were basically similar, and was the first perception of an entirely new order in the mind—a concept. This concept formed a hierarchy and then yielded a new structure of the mind. This structure enabled her to communicate and think for herself. The new mental structure’s trigger was the successful communication of the “pure language” or conceptual abstraction of water (Bohm, 1998, p. 5).
To be able to transmit the pure language of anything, it requires a tremendous amount of creativity. For Sullivan, creativity was maintaining her patience and slowly building the concept of water in Helen’s mind through experiences, the only tool she had to reach Helen. For Dr. Takahashi, it required her to almost become Mrs. Parks in every way (she shared that she imagined Mrs. Parks voice speaking in the target language so as to maintain her voice, her pure language), even down to her experiences and struggles (T. Takahashi, personal communication, January 22, 2009).
Outside of pure language, there are many different theories surrounding translation and the types of translation possible. Two types that encompass most of the types are covert and overt translation. Covert translation applies when the source text is not culture specific. It is the traditional, mechanical idea of translation that is based on creating a functional equivalence of the text, or the skopos (see footnote2). Overt translation is required when the source text is heavily dependent on the source culture. Employing overt translation is far more difficult than covert translation because the translator has to account for the differences in cultural presuppositions of the source and target language communities. In such situations, cultural filters have to be applied in order to account for those differences (Encyclopedia, 2000, p. 197). Designing and choosing the cultural filters that one will apply is very difficult. Examples of cultural filters in foreignization can be having an explanatory insertion in the text or footnote by the translation.
Whether covert or overt translation is employed, the translation must satisfy the coherence rule, the target text has to be understandable for its intended users, which includes background and situational circumstance knowledge (Encyclopedia, 2000, p. 235). All of this must occur while still maintain the integrity of the pure language.
Increasingly, the job of translator appears to be a mentally exhausting juggling act. But, if the above mentioned criteria are not satisfied, the translation cannot truly be a translation. It then becomes an adaptation which is based on the source text. Sir John Denham once said the following about translating, “if Virgil must needs speak English, it were fit he should speak not only as a man of this nation, but as a man of this age.” (Encyclopedia, 2000, p. 241). Sir Denham saw no issue with a translator claiming a bit of poetic license but it helps further emphasize the complicated role of the translator (see footnote3). How does s/he maintain the integrity of the source text? Creatively.
There are limits to a translator’s creativity and thus challenge whether a translator’s creativity is truly creative or simply re-creative. When working on any sort of translating problem, s/he must operate within certain sets of constraints which do not apply to original authors or artists. The constraints limit the cognitive process to a certain degree. They must deal with the limits of their task: the activity which has to be carried out and its context; their text: the linguistic and discoursal structure of the source text; and the translator him/herself: the limit of their linguistic and non-linguistic knowledge. All of these restraints draw on different cognitive resources and have different influences on the mind of the translator (Encyclopedia, 2000, p. 185).
The monolingual, obviously, doesn’t operate, under these same restraints. The monolingual is “sender-oriented,” in that he is paying attention to the speaker/writer’s message for the purpose of agreeing, disagreeing, replying, etc; whereas the translator must identify possible problems and recognize the translation relevant elements that must be included and addressed in the target text. The translator is thus “receiver-oriented,” s/he is actively listening to the speaker/writers message for retransmission to the receiver of the target text. The portion of this action that requires care, heightened attention and precision, it can be argued, has an element of cognitive creativity. Regardless, the translator constantly has the target text receiver in mind, and s/he must suppress and control his/her own personal reactions to the message in order to put the expectations of the target audience first (Encyclopedia, 2000, p. 185). The absorption of information from the source then becomes increasingly mechanical and pushes the act of translation closer to being re-creative rather than creative. This act of suppressing the translator’s self in favor of others, in my opinion, stifles his/her personal creative cognitive processes.
For the translator, as a multilingual person, his/her personal creative process is not monolingual, but when functioning as a translator, it must be monolingual. This further stifles his/her creative process by limiting the number of conceptual language planes s/he is allowed to work within.
Other than the linguistic planes a translator is confined to, s/he is also limited by the content of source text. Dr. Takahashi said that she didn’t like translating as much as writing her own books because writing a book involves more creativity in the process and product than translating does (T. Takahashi, personal communication, January 22, 2009).
These limits on the translator’s creativity prevent original creativity but do not hinder re-creativity. Also, original creativity involves making something completely new where there was nothing, translation makes something that can be argued as new (or not new) from where there already was something, which is definitely not original creativity. Here again, we have further re-creative support.
The re-creative translator, rather than artist, is constrained by the limits imposed by the text and conventions of the target text’s translation culture (Green, 2001, p. 8). S/he is like musical arranger: both must be more of an artist while working with pedestrian material, they both must surpass the original composer, and both are subordinate to the original work (Green, 2001, p. 29). In order to do this well, according to Green, you must have “mental agility rather than free creativity” (Green, 2001, p. 9). It is precisely because of this that Dr. Takahashi and so many other multilingual individuals prefer to create their own bodies of work, they enjoy the free creativity involved (T. Takahashi, personal communication, January 22, 2009).
In the world of literary texts, it is exponentially more difficult to translate in that the texts are highly personal and original. Non-literary texts are almost globally uniform and are designed to be impersonal and objective, so translating those are much more straightforward and cognitively simpler (Green, 2001, p. 11). The more personal and original the text is, the harder it is to translate. The harder it is to translate something, the more creativity is required for the translator. Also, the more unique the problem, the less practical general problem solving procedures and less automatic the whole process becomes (Encyclopedia, 2000, p. 57).
Think Aloud Protocols (TAPs) are one method translations studies researchers use to understand the mental process of translating. The researcher asks the translator to translate a text and verbalize as much of his/her thoughts as possible. The purpose of this method is to gain insight into the psychological and linguistic aspect of translating. The flaw of this method is that the translator can only verbalize what s/he is aware of, not any subconscious thoughts or automated tasks (Encyclopedia, 2000, p. 265).
Paul Kussmaul was the only translations studies researcher who conducted experiments that tested the correlation between creativity and translation ability. He had 2 of his translator training students conduct TAPs surrounding a translation assignment. They were asked to translate the following into German:
How well the summer wine goes down, whilst you bask in the balm of an island evening, fanned by flattery of murmuring machos and lulled by the lilt of gypsy guitars.
The specific translation problem they encountered was the phrase “murmuring machos. Their first solution was “Liebestoller Latin Loves” (love-crazed Latin Lovers) –which does not have the same poetic quality as “murmuring machos,” according to Kussmaul. They then employed the parallel activity technique, which is the technique of leaving one’s conscious mind alone for a while and thus creating the necessary relaxation for your mind to solve the problem sub-consciously—or otherwise known as “incubation.” After the students incubated during the time that it took to turn the cassette tape over, one of the student’s subconscious mind revealed a new solution: “bewundernde Blicke” (admiring looks). According to the students and Kussmaul’s opinion, this was a much better translation than the first suggestion (Kussmaul, 1995, p. 43).
This suggests that, like creativity, translation involves an element of subconscious thought, which opens up many research possibilities about their link with one another.
There is a positive link between bilinguals and creative advantage. Lubart argues that bilinguals have a more flexible approach to the world due to their broad linguistic perspective. They have a greater metalinguistic awareness of arbitrary, nonphysical aspects of words and the effects of context on the meaning of words. He says that they find it easier to encode and access knowledge in diverse ways which means a greater diversity of associations within the same concept because, in their minds, it occurs and exists in 2 different linguistic conceptual networks. They also have a greater tolerance for ambiguity which makes them comfortable with situations where one idea can have different nuances depending on their linguistic continuity. Lastly, Lubart says that their living conditions have bicultural benefits because they are exposed to multiple plains of human existence on a daily basis (Lubart, 1999, 344).
By nature, translators are bilingual, either by their living situation in their young life or by learning another language later in life. Either way, they have the flexible and complicated cognitive process that Lubart talks about that enables them to have a higher capacity for creativity. Regardless of previous arguments in this essay, translators themselves, as bilinguals, have this higher capacity for creativity; thus, even if translation, regardless of the translator, doesn’t involve creativity, by adding the bilingual translator, it suddenly has the potential to involve creativity.
In conclusion, the study of translation is a broad and complex field of study. While researching I discovered that most of the inquiry into this field has happened in the past 20-30 years, so it is still a very young field. It would be beneficial and is possibly inevitable that as it ages, it will be more clearly “mapped out” and will thus be easier to it to factionalize. But, before it does so, I suggest that the researchers within this field and those within the field of creativity come together and build a new field within both translation and creativity. It will give translation a needed push and will also move creativity research further into a field it has, to my understanding, only lightly tapped into.
By delving into both fields simultaneously, the creativity researchers can gather more data on the cognitive and subconscious process of creativity. While the translation researchers can understand more about the non-mechanical aspects of translation and why they happen the way they do.
Also, both fields can examine free dialogue and its effects on creativity. According to Bohm and Peat, when engaged completely in the dialogue, with every party’s point of view suspended and left with the logos during the duration of the dialogue, the dialogue can transform culture and free it of its “destructive mis-formation.” It can remove barriers and allow all of the individuals involved to bring forward their background and sub-cultural knowledge and thus free one another a little bit of those restraints. Once these restraints are loose, we can move in a new order and can make any amount associations together, within the logos (Bohm & Peat, 2000, p.240).
It would be intriguing to examine if something similar to logos is formed in the translator’s mind as s/he is in the act of translating. If there is a free dialogue between the languages the translator is employing and their cultures.
The world has infinitely many free associations that have yet to be made, and in an effort to bring this paper to a close, I suggest that you challenge yourself to make a new association in your mind and see if it doesn’t trigger a revolution of new associations which you can form into something worthwhile in your own life.
footnotes:
1.Translation problem: some part of the process of transfer —whether deriving from the reception of the source text or production of the target text— that makes the analysis or synthesis non-mechanical. (Encyclopedia, 2000, p. 187). Such a complicated problem can beg a creative solution which may lead the translator to utilize a mechanical
2.The skopos is a technical term for the purpose of the translation.
3.This depends on which translation theorist you side with. Some believe domestication, as Sir Denham is advocating, is in fact maintaining the integrity of the author’s voice. Though Virgil may be hundreds of years old, he spoke in his own modern tongue. Therefore when translated, he should speak in a modern tongue. The debate regarding modern vs. ancient intralingual translation is complicated and not relevant to the discussion of creativity at the moment (See Encyclopedia, “Strategies of Translation” for further explanation).
References
Baker, Mona (Ed.). (2000). Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (pp. 3-265). New York: Routledge.
Bohm, David. (1998) On Creativity (Lee Nichol, Ed.). (pp. 1-26). London: Routledge.
Bohm, D., Peat, F. D., (2000). Science, Order, and Creativity (2nd ed.). (pp. 229-201). New York: Routledge.
Dacey, J. S., Lennon, K. A., (1998). Understanding Creativity: The Interplay of Biological, Psychological, and Social Factors. (pp. 3-44). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Inc.
Green, Jeffrey M. (2001). Thinking Through Translation. (pp. 1-31). Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press.
Kussmaul, Paul. (1995). Training the Translator. Benjamins Translation Library. (Vol. 10). Philidelphia: John Benjamins North America.
Lubart, Todd. (1999). Creativity Across Cultures. Robert Sternburg (Ed.). Handbook of Creativity. (pp. 339-347) Cambridge University Press.
Martindale, Colin. (1999). Biological Bases of Creativity. Robert Sternburg (Ed.). Handbook of Creativity. (pp. 137-149). Cambridge University Press.
