An Empirical Research On Translational Creativity In Translation Process-a Comparison Of Professional And Student Translators

The economic market needs more all-around developed translators to meet the translation market needs, thus the development of translation competence is of great importance. Actually, the translational creativity is closely related to translation competence, and it has been studied in the scope of literary workings for years and much achievement has been made, while the related empirical studies on other typology remain to be extended. The present study combines the theory exploration and empirical study. It first proposes the concept and the componential model of translational creativity, and then by the method of think-aloud protocols, observation notes and post-interview, explores the declarative knowledge of professional and MTI student translators in the translation process, aiming at comparing the two groups on translational creativity and the influence of it on translation quality.The thesis aims to tackle the following three questions.(1) What is translational creativity in translation?(2) How does translational creativity reflect in the translation process?(3) How do the components of translational creativity affect translation quality?The findings are below.(1) Translational creativity belongs to the psycho-physiologic component which is part of TC. It functions in the form of identifying and solving translation problems and it affects translators' decision-making. Translational creativity is composed by ten components, namely, problem-sensitivity, fluency, originality, flexibility,acceptability, imagination, creative-understanding, confidence, inference and evaluation.(2)Translational creativity embodies in four stages- preparation, incubation, illumination and verification, and it appears obviously in illumination stage. Besides, prominent components are fluency, flexibility, imagination, acceptability, self-confidence and problem-identification, though the distribution of components differs in extent in each stage. In addition, during the whole translation process, prominent elements in order are fluency, flexibility, problem-sensitivity, evaluation, acceptability, confidence and inference.As far as the translation problems and strategies are concerned, problems encountered by participants can be grouped into three kinds: comprehension problems, production problems, combined problems(related to both comprehension and production), and then coping tactics can be classified into five types: abstraction, concretization, modification,delay translation and reproduction. Professional translators are more willing to resort to modification, abstraction and delay translation while MTI student translators tend to usemodification, delay translation and reproduction. Finally, the creative translation processing of professional translators(65.1%) is higher than that of MTI student translators(49.6%).(3) The quality of the target texts is grouped as higher quality group, the medium quality group and the lower quality group. Professional translators are higher quality group,who are more confident and much stronger in originality, fluency, imagination, evaluation and acceptability. And they also pay attention to the incubation and illumination stage. The lower quality group is poor in translational creativity, especially in confidence,acceptability, fluency and reference, and neglects the verification stage. The present study enriches the translation study and provides some guidance for the translation training.