Creativity as a Shared Component between Writing and Translation: An Empirical Study

Abstract

Writing and translation are two neighbouring disciplines, which share six dimensions from the text production perspective according to Dam-Jensen and Heine (2013). They propose that these disciplines share the dimensions of ‘‘phases, strategies, contextual features, creativity, competence, and profiles’’. When empirically tested, it is expected that these affinities between them are to be revealed. Thus, this research is set out to test and compare creativity as one of these shared dimensions.Methodologically, the study falls into two parts. The first is to establish the theoretical bases through discussions of different scholarly works about creativity in writing and translation, in particular, the empirical studies. The practical part includes an experiment in which student-translators (fourth year students in the Department of Translation at the University of Basra) were recruited to participate in the study. During the experimenting process, two tasks were given: first, the participants produced multiple compositions in English about a certain topic; and second, they individually translated a text of the same theme into English. Then, the outputs were analysed according to Tan (2009) model for the creative writing and Kussmaul's (1995) model for creative translation. Judgments were examined by a jury of experts.

The findings show that the creative dimension between writing and translation is not analogous and the results show that student translators obtained higher scores in writing than in translation. It is concluded that the creative element in translation is related to and affected by some other elements than those of writing; basically to the translator's competence which is at its early stages of development among student-translators and the level varies according to each student's abilities and personal attributes.