Translator’s Creative Treason in a Textless Back-Translation of The Joy Luck Club

This study examines the manifestation of translator’s creative treason in a selected Chinese textless back-translation version of The Joy Luck Club by identifying and classifying three types of translator’s creative treason: individualized translation, mistranslation and omission, and abridged translation and trans-editing. It further examines the patterns of linguistic and cultural return in the target text of The Joy Luck Club. Guided by Toury’s (2012) discovery procedure, the study adopts a qualitative research design and conducts a comparative analysis based on a parallel corpus. The findings reveal notable differences among the three types of translator’s creative treason in the target text. Although the target text foregrounds a unidirectional pattern of cultural return in all three types of translator’s creative treason, the linguistic pattern is bidirectional, which further attenuates linguistic hybridity in the textless back-translation version of The Joy Luck Club.