Creative translation and translucinación in practice-based research and pedagogy

Abstract

Translucinación is a term coined by Chilean poet Andrés Ajens to “describe how translation is a form of reading and writing that creates new work, new conversations” (Osman and Spahr iii). In this article, I tell a story of how I have adapted and expanded this term to experiment with translation practices that deviate from translational norms such as fidelity, accuracy and equivalence. Deviating from the norm opens it, shows its mechanisms, gaps and fissures, its blind spots and points of aporia. It is in this way that translucinación, as I am using it, can be used as a creative writing practice-based research tool to cope with the unprecedented rupture that is happening in translation studies, and thus the study of languages and texts in their cultural, global differences. The aim of this research is also to reconnect research with pedagogical practice in the form of creative, process driven methods wherein teachers and students of language, writing and translation might find ways to break free from the oppressive limitations of a system stupefied by mastery, in both senses of that term.

Keywords

• translation
• creative writing
• practice-based research
• transcreation
• creative translation
• machine translation