Corpus Methods for Descriptive Translation Studies

Over the last 20 years corpus resources and tools have considerably affected translation research and practice. This paper focuses on the intersection of corpus linguistics and descriptive translation studies. It first provides an overview of several types of descriptive investigation based on corpora, to focus then on research on so-called translation universals, offering a survey of some 20 studies and making a distinction among descriptive features, linguistic indicators and computational operators. I briefly discuss research on universal features, and describe the corpora surveyed in terms of a typology of translation-driven corpora. I then consider some methodological issues concerning corpus design and annotation and, finally, I suggest that a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches is crucial to further research in corpus-based translation studies.