Is Creativity Lost in Translation?

This paper presented at the Cultural Translation and East Asia conference traced the development of the notion of creativity in Confucian heritage and Western cultures and explored how understandings of creativity are culturally situated. Current international research on creativity such as Richard Florida’s (2002) notion of a creative class was reviewed utilising measures from Asia, Europe and the US and a dialogue was encouraged around the extent to which creativity is an internal personality related construct or a context-dependent phenomenon.