Introduction. Into the Translation for Museums, Festivals, and the Stage: Creativity and the Transmedial Turn

Abstract

Current trends in research into translation and creativity have testified to the recent shift in translation studies towards creative translation, creative writing, and the translator's subjectivity. Such a shift does not only apply to literary translation, but also affects audiovisual translation and its application to the creative cultural industries, where creativity and the translator's subjectivity are intertwound with a number of notions which involve familiarisation vs. domestication, the dictates of participatory cultures, deviation from standard parameters and/or the mainstream, creative translation as transcreation, as the sum of faithful transmission and creation, as semiotic adaptation, as a new AVT type, or as an enhanced type of AVT. Creativity in AVT has also been viewed as an aesthetic tool, a political act, especially with reference to media accessibility, and as a linguistic device that belongs to the sphere of translation and strengthens user participation.

Today, the most diverse and heterogeneous types of translation, combined with instruments in multimodality, occupy aesthetic spaces to a very great extent, the horizons of translation having broadened and moved beyond textual and linguistic constraints. Types of interlingual and intralingual translations, as well as different forms of cultural transfer, also embracing processes of remediation, all dominate the diversified landscape of the creative and cultural sector, such as in the setting of museums, festivals, and theatres. Museums, festivals and theatres, as both physical and virtual sites, are conceived as places of encounter, cultural transfer, and collective learning, and are conceptualised as translational spaces, where translation coexists with forms of everyday language with the scope of catering for the different language user needs and of encouraging the adoption of emergent audiovisual translation modalities.