Parallel Corpora in Translation Studies: Issues in Corpus Design and Analysis

This article deals with the design and analysis of 'translation-driven' corpora, i.e. principled collections of electronic texts compiled with the aim of studying translation products and processes, with special reference to parallel corpora. The comparison and contrast of paired translation units is, of course, not new to translation research, but the possibility of retrieving on a computer screen hundreds of similar contexts and their translations, and the relative ease of combining this with statistical analysis and data manipulation, allow hypotheses to be tested on a larger scale as well as tentative generalizations to be made. Corpus linguistics is seen as a methodology which can be applied to various facets of translation studies in the same way as it is applied to the study of textual products in linguistics. Parallel corpora, as well as other 'translation-driven' corpora, can complement other types of investigation of printed texts in translation studies. It is suggested in this article that issues of corpus design (which types of texts are included, what languages are involved, which criteria are used for sampling, what the research aims and applications of the projects are), and corpus encoding (how the 'translation' from printed texts to electronic corpus comes about) deserve careful consideration insofar as these issues are likely to affect findings based on corpora. It is also argued that, in order to enhance and maximize the advantage which can be derived from research based on electronic texts in translation studies, there is a need for greater standardization and interchange of corpus resources.