ABSTRACT
Translation professionals have been urged to future-proof themselves by undertaking an increasing range of interlingual communication tasks which reflect the new demands of a globalised world. In this chapter, we argue that these new tasks can be conceptualised as requiring either “rebranding” or “expanding” of the translation concept. We contend that implicit in the rebranding of translation is a message that translation is not in and of itself able to respond to these new demands and hence is thus in need of future-proofing. Whereas, if we continue to expand the translation concept, many of these new tasks can be understood as translations. One consequence of expanding the translation concept is to see translation as intrinsically creative and hence we have used transcreation as a prism to explore the two approaches to translation. We contend that explicitly introducing discussions on the nature of creativity, translation and trancreation as part of translation education will help to future-proof the translation profession by providing future generations of translators with an expanded understanding of translation that can encompass many of the new “translation-like” activities. These discussions are supported by the findings of a survey of professional translators, translator educators and students investigating their perceptions of translation and creativity.
