Chinese four-character idioms are highly condensed conventionalized expressions whose meanings may combine lexical content, figurative imagery, pragmatic force, and culturally specific associations. Their translation therefore provides a useful test case for examining how literary translators negotiate source-text imagery, contextual meaning, and target-language readability. This study investigates four-character idioms in Yu Hua’s Huozhe and Michael Berry’s English translation To Live through an occurrence-based parallel-corpus design combining quantitative frequency analysis with qualitative textual interpretation. A specialized corpus containing 153 distinct source-text idioms and 229 aligned translation occurrences was analyzed. To avoid overlap between broad labels such as “literal” and “free” translation, each occurrence was assigned to one of four mutually exclusive operational categories: literal translation, paraphrase, idiomatic substitution, or omission. The corpus coding yielded 120 literal translations (52.40%), 94 paraphrases (41.05%), 8 idiomatic substitutions (3.49%), and 7 omissions (3.06%). Representative, non-borderline source–target pairs were then interpreted with reference to the linguistic, cultural, and communicative dimensions of eco-translatology. The results show that the dominant pattern lies between retention of recognizable source imagery and direct semantic restatement in ordinary English. Literal translation is favored where source imagery remains interpretable after necessary grammatical adaptation, whereas paraphrase is used where direct transfer would risk obscuring the immediate narrative meaning. Idiomatic substitution is comparatively rare under the adopted coding criteria because it requires a functionally comparable conventional English expression, while omission is a selective category reserved for alignments in which no independent target rendering is required for the relevant contribution to remain recoverable from context. Recurring idioms further show that the same source expression can receive different English realizations when its grammatical role, collocational environment, or discourse function changes. The study contributes a transparent occurrence-level classification of idiom translation in To Live and demonstrates how quantitative strategy patterns can be connected to context-sensitive multidimensional interpretation without treating any single strategy as intrinsically superior.
