In relation to two contemporary works of literature, Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003) and Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2007), this essay sets out a view of reading and writing as essentially translational and transformational acts. It argues that text design and production in the contemporary age, at a time when many writers of works in English are the product of more than one culture and language, depend upon access to and the ability to transform a range of cultural and material resources. It is concerned with ‘how newness enters the world’ (Bhabha 2007) in the era of globalization and postmodernity and sees creativity as an outcome of both readerly and writerly acts of cultural, generic and linguistic translation.