Translator’s creativity in cultural elements transposition: a corpus-based study

This article presents a corpus-based study developed to determine the degree of creativity (as opposed to conventionalism) in the translation of cultural elements. Considering creativity as the use of those strategies that manipulate the lexical material of the source language, a literary corpus consisting of 50 novels (25 translations and 25 corresponding originals) was examined through corpus linguistics. Firstly, culture-specific elements were identified; secondly, translation strategies were determined; and finally, they were placed in conventional or creative groups. The results show that transposition of culture-specific elements is strictly related to creativity.