What is the creative aspect of literary translation?    Asked on
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(Answer #1)  When you think about it, if you are translating a
classic work of literature from one language into another, you
necessarily have to be creative in how you complete this task.
This is because langauges are not the same in terms of the
meaning one word can have and the different expressions you can
create with that word. Every word in every language can convey a
very different idea or series of associations in that language
to its audience. The challenge of translating is to try and
capture such subtle nuances in the original langauge and convey
them in a different language in the translation.  Take Spanish
for example. Spanish has a tense called the subjunctive that we
do not have any more in English, and is used to express a vague
hypothetical future that is not fully realised as yet. The
Spanish language can be thus used to express concisely and
succinctly possible hyp