Translatorʼs Creativity in Literary Translation: A Case Study of Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Translators are engaged in a process of negotiation between two cultures, two languages and two different mindsets. A process which calls forth a profound understanding of the language they are translating from and a fluency in the language they are translating into. The complex and creative process of adapting one text into a new reality, mediating between your source and target language insinuates that a translator’s task Creativity and translation are inseparable, especially in literary rendition. A translator should always be resourceful in terms of vocabulary and syntactic structures in order to handle repetitions in the source text. Literary translators in particular need to be also creative in translating the formalities of the source text. In this paper, creativity in literary translation will be tackled through two Persian translations of Nietzcheʼs Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Ashouri’s translation was identified as far more literary than Gholami’s translation, because of his coined and wide range of literary words.

Keywords:

Literary Translation , Lexicon , Nietzsche , Thus Spoke Zarathustra , Coinage