This essay attempts to gain critical purchase on the burgeoning field of enquiry, within Translation and Translator Studies, that is focused on the matters of creativity and originality. What does it mean to claim that translators are creative, and that their translations are creations? At issue is perhaps negotiating beyond the truisms (indeed translators are creative, and assuredly their translations are creations) and engaging with what the present essay argues remain the difficult challenges to be faced: why is creation and creativity, when such things are achieved by translators and translations, always invidiously assessed in respect of a putatively unattainable originality? Is that unattainable originality always a consequence of the still‑abiding doctrine of translatory fidelity and the imposition of the prescriptions and laws of equivalence? The present essay seeks to gain a degree of clarity on such matters by proposing (without endorsing) three options: translation and creativity, translation as creativity, translation or creativity. The aim is then to relay such options to a broader inspection of past and current research in Translation and Translator Studies, as well as to certain instructive reference points in the philosophical, psychoanalytic, and psychological literature on the topic of creativity.

Texts that display multiple relationships with nonverbal elements (music, images, scene) are likely to demonstrate more than others that some forms of translation cannot, or cannot yet, be fully taken over by machines. The human translator remains the final authority for weighing the many choices and their consequences when transferring a polysemiotic artifact from one cultural context into another. The subject of this book chapter is the effects of translational decisions on the syntactic connection between music and language. Comparing the recitatives from Gluck’s Italian‑language opera Orfeo ed Euridice (1762) with a French translation by Pierre‑Louis Moline (1774)—as well as two German translations, by Heinrich Abert (1914) and Hans Swarowsky (1962)—the chapter shows the resultant changes in the target text when completely new recitatives are composed, or when attempting to ensure that the original music be preserved in the translation.

As an inroad into translating sustainability and sustaining translation, the article takes a close look at the translational interactions between humans and aliens in Ted Chiang’s novella “Story of Your Life” (1998) and the 2016 film adaptation, Arrival. The close reading covers two aspects of the story: (1) alienation from the familiar, so that the alien experience, which is so disconcerting at first, comes to feel ordinary, with metaphorical extensions of the human‑alien encounter to colonizers and the colonized and parents and children; and (2) coming unstuck in time, perceiving time from what is apparently the fourth dimension, so that temporal sequence is denarrativized. In two conclusions, the implications for “sustaining translation” (section 4) and “translating sustainability” (section 5) are considered, the latter in terms of both cultural sustainability and the sustainability of the natural environment on Earth.