The Translator’s Creative Treason In Literary Translation

In traditional translation studies, the translated texts are evaluated based on whether they are faithful to the original and translation is considered as the transformation between two languages. However, translation is actually more than that; it involves the transmission of different cultures, especially literary translation, which requires both the equivalence in the language forms and the artistic representation of the heterogeneous cultures. Since the cultural turn in1970s, the research about the translator has become an important part in translation studies. The focus of translation study is no longer on whether the source language and target language are equivalent or not. Researchers attach more importance to the cultural background of the translated works and the influences on the target language and culture, etc. The method of descriptive translation study is adopted to reveal the differences, collision and distortion of different cultures.Creative treason in medio-translatology is such an activity, and thus attracts the researchers a lot. Scholars of comparative literature deem translated works as components of the target culture, holding that creative treason is the misinterpretation of the source culture which reflects the collision of the two cultures in translation and in the meantime, it is an important factor benefiting the development of target literature. The term "creative treason" is first proposed by Robert Escarpit who holds that translation is always a kind of creative treason. The translation strategies such as addition, deletion and rewriting are all manifestations of treason to the source text, but there is no denying that it gives the second life of the source text in a different culture. As the main subject in translation, the translator inevitably becomes the subject of creative treason. The study on the translator’s creative treason has attracted increasing attention of the researchers recently.The British Sinologist Herbert Allen Giles translated Pu Songling’s collection Liao Zhai Zhi Yi in the19th century. It is the earliest English version and covers a variety of topics. Traditional translation study method is mainly adopted in the available studies of Giles’version and after either the study on its language or the comparative study among several versions, conclusions are drawn that Giles" translation is the most treasonous version to the original text or inferior to the others. However, from the perspective of medio-translatology, certain factors contribute to the occurrence of Giles’creative treason.In this thesis, Giles’ English version of Liao Zhai Zhi Yi is analyzed based on descriptive translation studies. The causes, manifestations and influences of the translator’s creative treason are explored with a lot of examples and the following conclusions are drawn:the translator’s creative treason refers to the conscious and initiative activities after being influenced by the subjective and objective factors in the forms of deletion, supplement, conscious misreading and rewriting of the original text; the translator’s creative treason appears not only because of the translator’s prejudice formed before the understanding of the original text, but also due to the influences of some objective factors such as the characteristics of literary translation, the lingual and cultural disparities between the texts, power discourse and the target language readers; it is because the translator’s creative treason that the artistic life of the source text is extended and the translated version exerts influences on the target literature and participates in the construction of the target culture.