CREAMT : Creativity and narrative engagement of literary texts translated by translators and NMT (2022)

Abstract: We present here the EU-funded project CREAMT that seeks to understand what is meant by creativity in different translation modalities, e.g. machine translation, post-editing or professional translation. Focusing on the textual elements that determine creativity in translated literary texts and the reader experience, CREAMT uses a novel, interdisciplinary approach to assess how effective MT is in literary translation considering creativity in translation and the ultimate user: the reader.

## introduction research has shed some light on the usability of machine translation (mt) in literary texts @xcite , showing that mt might help literary translators when it comes to productivity. at the same time, translators' perception is that the "more creative" the literary text, the less useful mt is @xcite . but can we quantify the creativity in texts translated by humans as opposed to those produced with the aid of machines? and, since one of the aims of the translation of a literary text is to preserve the reading experience of the original, what is the reader's experience when faced with machine-translated texts? do users exposed to different translation modalities have different reading experiences? to provide answers to these questions, the creamt is articulated in two main axes with a two-year duration. the first axis proposes to © 2022 the authors. this article is licensed under a creative commons 3.0 licence, no derivative works, attribution, ccby-nd. identify creative shifts (see section 2.2) while the second axis seeks to identify reader's narrative engagement and gather data on enjoyment and translation reception. ## first axis we translated two stories: murder in the mall by sherwin b. @xcite was translated into catalan for a pilot project and 2br02b by kurt @xcite was translated into catalan and dutch for the main experiment. ## second axis an on-line questionnaire consisting of three parts was distributed to 88 catalan participants in the pilot and 223 catalan and dutch participants in the main project using an on-line survey software. ## outcomes a pilot was run in catalan in 2020. the results showed that ht presented a higher creativity score if compared to pe and mt. ht also ranked higher in narrative engagement, and translation reception, while pe ranked marginally higher in enjoyment. (guerberof-arenas and toral 2020). the main experiment for dutch and catalan confirmed these results for axis 1: ht has the highest creativity score, followed by pe, and lastly, mt, in both languages. post-editing mt output constrains the creativity of translators, resulting in a poorer translation often not fit for publication according to experts. @xcite . axis 2 was finished in march 2022 and it is under evaluation.