On The Translator's Creativity In Literary Translation

For centuries, scholars haven't made agreements in the attitudes towards the translator's creativity. Generally speaking, translation studies from the linguistic approach are negative about the translator's creativity, while studies from other schools mostly hold affirmative attitudes. With the emergency of"cultural turn"in translation studies, the translator's status has been acknowledged and valued seriously with more and more attention. But the existing studies pay most attention to the creative translation, through which they find out what is created by the translator on the levels of language and culture, instead of the translator's creativity itself. So, the author of this thesis firstly claims from the perspective of cognitive psychology that in translation the translator's creativity is inevitable and necessary, then the author proposes that the existing studies on the creative translation from the perspective of language and culture are limited to the product and the external representation of the translator's creativity, which cannot give explanations to the nature of the translator's creativity, neither can it explain how the creative translation is determined by the translator's creativity on earth.. Next, the author points out that it is the translator that determines what to create and how to create in the process of translation, so it is necessary to combine the creative translation and the process of translation together to study the translator's creativity. In this sense, we should study the translator's creation factors'influence on and determination of the creative translation.The author tries to study the translator's creativity in literary translation because the translator's creativity is not only inevitable but also necessary in literary translation on the one hand, and on the other hand, the literary works leave the translator sufficient space to create due to their own characters, which fully embodies the translator's creativity. The author of this thesis proposes that the translator's creativity works in the process of translation, and it is affected by the translator's cognition factors, so it is necessary to study the process of literary translation from the perspective of cognitive psychology to reveal how the creative translation comes into being and how it is affected by the translator's cognition factors, by which the author can make clear how the translator's creativity works and get a full understanding of it.