Les enjeux de la créativité dans l'activité traduisante

Abstract

The contemporary translation studies has been concentrating on a new aspect of translation and drawing attention to different issues of translating practice day by day. Even though translation has gained esteem in recent decades, the value of the translator has still a notion that has not fully emerged. The purpose of this work is to demonstrate the necessity of creativity in translation and to define the limits of the implementation of this creativity. Since translator's creativity depends on the translator, we have been able to focus on the translator, protagonist of the translating activity, who has remained for many years under the shadow of the translated work and its author, and to underline also the importance of the linguistic and perilinguistic knowledge necessary for accomplishing a translation that suits the criteria of a true and creative translation. This study provides a brief history of translation by taking into account the past of creativity in translation; and ranges intratextual and extratextual elements like linguistic, cultural and artistic values of the text which should be translated in an equivalent way in order to complete a true translation. We will also see the different approaches that translation researchers propose to deal with the translation problems encountered during the translating practice. However, we will see how the translator should or should not be creative through examples of literary translation from French to Turkish and from Turkish to French; when the teachings of translation studies, a developing science, do not provide a solution to the problems arising from deep linguistic and cultural differences generally, and this approach will enable us to conclude on the limits of creativity in translation.