The aim of this article is to examine issues of conventionality and creativity in the area of corpus linguistics and corpus Translation Studies, taking as a springboard the author’s experience of using the British National Corpus in the classroom as an aid to translation into the foreign language. The chapter focuses on the question of whether the use of corpora for the purposes of target language production and creative writing in general, tends to result in the reproduction of the recurring patterns that corpora themselves may be considered to reveal and highlight, or whether they provide a backdrop of recurring patterns from which we can creatively deviate. The question has particular significance in the context of translated texts, which recent research has claimed are already more conventional than original texts, and even greater significance for translation into the foreign language, where the translator has less room for manoeuvre in terms of imaginative TL usage. Focused research projects are encouraged to provide much-needed insights into the issues raised.