Corpora in Translation

Corpus resources and tools have come to play an increasingly important role both in translation studies research and in translation practices. In translation studies, corpora have provided a basis for empirical descriptive research. Corpus-based studies usually involves the comparison of two (sub)corpora, in which translated texts are compared with either their source texts (parallel corpus) or with another (sub)corpus constructed according to similar design criteria (comparable corpus), either in the same or in another language. These corpora are used to investigate regularities of translated texts, regularities of translators and regularities of languages. Regularities of translation may consist either of universal features which are hypothesized to be distinctive of translated texts as opposed to non translated texts, or of translation norms and strategies which characterize texts translated under specific social and historical circumstances. Regularities of translators are individual linguistic habits manifested through consistently different (unconscious) patterns of choices, independently of the source texts. Parallel corpora are used, together with bilingual or multilingual comparable corpora, to compare and contrast regularities of languages. Bi- and multi-lingual corpora have also found application in translator education. Parallel corpora offer learners a repository of translator’s strategies and choices, while comparable corpora provide them with a mapping of the words and structures employed by different linguistic communities for building discourse. Approaches to corpus use in translator education include both training in computer-assisted translation and experiential approaches to corpus use. Practical applications of corpora in translation comprise resources and tools for assisted and automatic translation, including translation memories and corpus-based statistical machine translation. This chapter provides an overview of how corpora are used for descriptive and applied purposes, and discusses research findings and implications for translation trainees, professionals and users.