The Corpus-based Approach: A New Paradigm in Translation Studies

Abstract

Only a few years ago, Baker (1993: 243) predicted that the availability of large corpora of both original and translated texts, together with the development of a corpus- driven methodology, would enable translation scholars to uncover "the nature of translated text as a mediated communicative event." Since then, a growing number of scholars in translation studies have begun to seriously consider the corpus-based approach as a viable and fruitful perspective within which translation and translating can be studied in a novel and systematic way. Contrastive linguists have also recognised the value of translation corpora as resources for the study of languages, and translator trainers have begun to design general and specialised corpora to aid the comprehension of source language texts and improve production skills. The aim of this issue's collection of corpus-based studies is twofold. On the one hand, it attempts to outline the existing territory occupied by a new field of research in translation studies; on the other, it hopes to show that the corpus-based approach is evolving, through theoretical elaboration and empirical realisation, into a coherent, composite and rich paradigm that addresses a variety of issues pertaining to theory, description, and the practice of translation. The studies included in this volume have been grouped into two main categories on the basis of their primary research focus. The first group consists of discussions concerning theoretical issues pertaining to the scope, object of study, and methodology of the corpus-based approach. The second is made up of empirical and pedagogical studies of translation and translating. The concluding paper by Maria Tymoczko draws on the insights provided by these studies and discusses the role that computerised corpora will play within the discipline as a whole.