The use of corpora in legal and institutional translation studies

Abstract

Research in legal and institutional translation within the realm of Legal Translation Studies (LTS) has greatly benefited from embracing the advances of Corpus Linguistics in the past few decades. This paper provides an overview of corpus-based approaches in LTS and illustrates their increasing prominence and sophistication through the description of seven selected representative projects, including a wide range of corpus types, translation contexts, legal genres, jurisdictions, sizes and languages. The comparative examination of these studies confirms the relevance of corpus methods for LTS, the need to integrate quantitative and qualitative considerations (crucially including legal parameters) into corpus-building criteria, as well as the correlation between research scope and methodological nuance in ensuring corpus suitability.