On the basis of Aixela’s theory of translation approaches and strategies for culture-specific items as well as self-compiled parallel corpus model in Sketch Engine, this research sets out to investigate the creative employments of typical four-character Chinese idioms (chengyu and sizige) in the three Chinese translations of Nineteen Eighty-Four respectively by Dong Leshan, Sun Zhongxu, as well as Lau Shiu-ming. In accordance with the manual annotation of particular translation methods in each chengyu and sizige, and the aid of parallel corpus, the characteristics of chengyu and sizige uses in the three separate versions, as well as the circumstances of the translation approaches and strategies adoptions and their corresponding ratios are quantitatively revealed. Afterwards, the author further makes qualitative analysis on the motivations of three translator’s creative applications of chengyu and sizige from the main social translation specification in the society as well as their personal views for literary translation. The main purpose of this corpus-based study of translator’s creativity is to provide a new lexical perspective – typical four-character Chinese idioms – for the research on translator’s creativity.

Luo Lin. Translator’s Creativity in Fiction: A Corpus-based Study of the Chinese Versions of Nineteen Eighty-Four. International Journal of Frontiers in Sociology (2023), Vol. 5, Issue 7: 84-91. https://doi.org/10.25236/IJFS.2023.050714.

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