On Creative Treason In Literary Translation: From The Perspective Of Semiotics

The subject of this thesis is a controversial proposition in literary translation. As a strategic means adopted by translators to achieve certain reproducing purposes, creative treason involves translators' creation and is represented by the treason from the original text/culture or the target language in either the contents or the form. The characteristic of creative treason is translators' involvement of their consciousness and subjectivity. Successful creative treason should be proliferous, represented by the exploration, demonstration, judgment and confirmation of the new values. This thesis excludes mistranslations due to translators' ignorance, irresponsibility or incapability from the domain of creative treason, because the author believes such mistranslations can be avoided through the subjective efforts.The domestic translation study has stepped into a blind alley from the linguistic perspective. It needs cross-discipline analysis. The present thesis applies the semiotic theory, especially the three sign meanings as the methodology. It states that creative treason occurs when designative meaning, linguistic meaning and pragmatic meaning have conflicts with each other and cannot be transmitted at the same time. Under such circumstances, the translator chooses the most important meaning(s) and abandons the other meaning(s).Meanwhile, this thesis discusses the values, defects and extents of applying creative treason. It illustrates the values of creative treason in the aspects of the spread of the culture and the text and understanding towards literary translators. It also argues that creative treason is not omnipotent. When translators adopt creative treason, they should pay enough attention to the extents and make it work for good literary translations.