Corpus-based Translation Studies is still in its infancy, and methods of interrogating corpora that are specially adapted to the needs of translation scholars have yet to be devised. For the time being then, translation scholars have to rely on existing corpus-processing tools in their studies of often highly abstract features of source and target texts. This article reports on how two such tools – the WordList and Concord programs in WordSmith Tools – are pressed into service in a study of lexical normalization in GEPCOLT, a German-English Parallel Corpus of Literary Texts. It focuses on methods used in the initial phase of the study, during which instances of lexical creativity are identified in the source texts, and explores the usefulness of various types of lists, including keyword and cluster lists, and concordances, in identifying creative hapax legomena, writer-specific forms, and unusual collocations. Finally, an attempt is made to evaluate the performance of each method in terms of its levels of precision and recall in extracting creative uses of lexis, all the while keeping in mind the tension between what the researcher wants from the software and what the software is actually capable of outputting.