What it is
Discursive creation establishes an equivalence that holds only inside the text that produced it. Outside that text the pairing is unpredictable: no dictionary records it, no analysis of the source item would generate it, and the same item in a different work would take a different target. What justifies the rendering is the function the item performs in this text for this readership, typically naming, labelling or attracting.
Delisle proposed the notion as a cognitive operation in the translation process, part of his account of what a translator does when no pre-existing correspondence is available and the target must be created rather than retrieved. Molina and Hurtado Albir take the term into their inventory and redefine it, in line with the argument running through their article, as a technique describing the result rather than the process: the label applies to a solution visible in the target text, not to the mental route that produced it. Their illustration is the film title Rumble Fish, released in Spanish as La ley de la calle.
Attribution here is regularly misreported. Secondary literature often credits discursive creation to Molina and Hurtado Albir, because their 2002 article is the accessible English-language source in which most readers first meet the term. The term is Delisle's, and Molina and Hurtado Albir say so; what is theirs is the reclassification. The point is not pedantry: the two authors describe different objects, one a process and one a product, and citing the wrong one credits a taxonomy of results with a claim about cognition.
The neighbouring categories are distinguished by what they draw on. An established equivalent is retrieved from what the target language has already settled. A translation label is provisional and referential, offered while a proper term is awaited. A discursive creation is neither: definitive for its text, invalid outside it.
When it applies
- Titles of films, books and works of art, where the target market rather than the source wording determines what the item is called.
- Slogans and product names, where effect on the reader is the commissioned deliverable.
- Section headings in journalism and marketing copy, which must work in the target as headings.
- Nicknames, epithets and invented names whose source form carries a sense the target form must recreate by other means.
Examples
EN>ES
- Source: Rumble Fish
- Target: La ley de la calle
- Comment: Molina and Hurtado Albir's own illustration. The Spanish shares no lexical material with the English and names a theme of the film rather than its central image. No translator working backwards from the Spanish would reach the English, which is the defining property of the technique.
EN>FR
- Source: The Hangover
- Target: Very Bad Trip
- Comment: The French release title is built from English words that are not the source's, on the calculation that this reads as a comedy title to a French audience. The equivalence is settled by the target market's conventions, and the technique has not left the source language.
FR>EN
- Source: Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain
- Target: Amélie
- Comment: Radical shortening, and equally unpredictable. A rendering of the French wording was available and accurate; it was rejected because the target title's job is to be memorable in English, not to report the French.
Watch out for
The technique confers the widest latitude in the inventory, and its scope is correspondingly narrow. It is licensed by text type, not by difficulty: a passage that resists translation is not thereby a candidate.
- Never let a discursive creation into a term base. The pairing is valid for one text, and recorded as a term it will surface where it is simply wrong.
- Distinguish it from adaptation. Adaptation replaces a source cultural element with a target one that plays the same role; discursive creation invents a target item with no source counterpart to replace.
- It is unavailable in documentary, certified and legal translation, including the titles of statutes, judgments and certificates, where the reader must be able to identify the instrument named. There the requirement is a recognized translation, or the source designation retained with a gloss.
References
- Delisle, J. (1993). La traduction raisonnée: manuel d'initiation à la traduction professionnelle de l'anglais vers le français. Ottawa: Presses de l'Université d'Ottawa.
- Delisle, J., Lee-Jahnke, H. & Cormier, M. C. (eds) (1999). Terminologie de la traduction / Translation Terminology. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
- Molina, L. & Hurtado Albir, A. (2002). "Translation Techniques Revisited: A Dynamic and Functionalist Approach." Meta 47(4), 498–512.