Creative Treason In Literary Translation

The essence of any translation is to transmit the message already expressed in one language to another language. However, literary translation is more complicated than most non-literary translation. It aims at not only transmitting messages, but also providing aesthetic enjoyment for the reader, so it is art and requires translators' creativity; however, linguistic and cultural differences make translators' treason inevitable. In order to overcome these obstacles and faithfully reproduce the original text to the largest extent, the translator must resort to creative treason.The proposal of creative treason, on the one hand, manifests the intrinsic limitations of translating activity, but more importantly, it recognizes the translator's creativity—to creatively overcome the limitations in the pursuit of faithful reproduction of the original text. Therefore, creative treason and faithfulness don't contradict each other.This thesis is to analyze typical examples in Yang Bi's translation of Vanity Fair, illustrating that creative treason is indispensable to great literary translation, and that it is essentially a sort of faithful translation strategy.This paper consists of six chapters. Chapter One is an introduction. In Chapter Two, the characteristics of literary language are firstly touched upon; then the definition of literary translation is elicited, and its three main characteristics, namely aesthetics, vividness and limitations, are analyzed through some typical examples. Since these three features are embodied in creativity and treason in literary translation, Chapter Three is to discuss them in great detail. Furthermore, as they are inter-related, no wonder there comes the proposal of creative treason. In Chapter Four, firstly, literature reviews about the proposal and development of this theory are to be presented. After that, the term "creative treason" will be newly defined and the causes of it will be further analyzed. In addition, its essence and relationship with faithfulness are also thoroughly discussed. Chapter Five illustrates creative treason as the detour to faithfulness through the analysis of some typical examples and discusses the values of creative treason, and Chapter Six is a conclusion.