How creative can translation be(come)?

Creativity has always troubled the boundaries of translation, as too little of it reduces translation to reproduction, while too much threatens to make it something else altogether.And still, what happens to translation once reproduction is no longer its governing metaphor?The question has acquired particular urgency at a moment when increasingly sophisticated forms of machine translation and artificial intelligence seem to promise precisely what translation theory has spent decades complicating: reliable one-way transfer, reproducibility, and equivalence.As a result, 2024-2025 proved remarkably rich in books moving in the opposite direction, treating translation as a site of creation, experimentation and transformation.Published within less than two years of one another, three volumes approach this emerging terrain from strikingly different directions.M a Carmen África Vidal Claramonte and Tong King Lee's Hypertranslation (Cambridge University Press, 2024), part of the Elements in Translation and Interpreting series, offers the broadest conceptual reorientation, describing translation as a mobile field of relations across languages, modes, and media in which source and target, directionality, and authenticity are themselves placed in flux.