Transcreation & Multidisciplinary Translation Theories

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Very often, translation involves rewriting and research. The writer of this article has found that due to the drastic differences between English thinking and Chinese thinking, between these two languages and between these two cultures, not all Chinese writings “equal” their English versions completely, that is, there are “imbalances” between them more or less, and this is especially true in the literary translation area. Further, the author of this article suggests that some “imbalances” are created purposely in order to retain “fidelity” to the source work and the source culture to some extent while integrating with the target language and the target culture. In addition, the author pointed out some “loopholes” in the traditional and classic Chinese translation theories, and proposed several transcreation theories to countermeasure the “loopholes” and to illustrate “imbalances”. In this article, the author coined a new word, “transwriting”, and dissected the translation process into two processes, that is, understanding and rewriting. In addition, the author proposed a novel translation theory that incorporates the writing field in both the source language and the target language, for the purpose of cultural transmission and integration, and further illustrated the relationship between translation and writing and especially literary writing. In this way, the author expands the transcreation field to include the writing field and especially the literary writing field. Moreover, the author suggests that the transcreation field develop some criteria, such as, stringency, accuracy, flexibility, and that all the science, social science and humanities subareas in the transcreation field are categorized according to these criteria. Also, the author suggests that the Chinese-English translation realm expand to incorporate the research theories and methods in other fields, such as, science (e.g., statistical methods), and that the translation realm restructure its system of theories and educational system to meet the demands of the era of global integration, for example, establishing a translation minor for each science major. Although this article mainly addresses the Chinese-English translation realm, it can also provide valuable ideas to other translation pairs. At last, this article may shed new light on the limitations of and possible solutions to machine translation in the various translation sub-areas and especially the literary translation area. For example, this article may answer questions like “Is understanding unimportant for machine translation?” In order to support the transcreation theories and multidisciplinary translation theories proposed in this article, some typical examples are provided.