Article published In:
Corpus-Based Research in Legal and Institutional TranslationEdited by Fernando Prieto Ramos
[Translation Spaces 8:1] 2019
► pp. 1–11
Edited by Fernando Prieto Ramos
[Translation Spaces 8:1] 2019
► pp. 1–11
The use of corpora in legal and institutional translation studies
Directions and applications
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.
Keywords: legal corpora, Corpus-Based Legal Translation Studies (CBLTS), research methodology, parallel corpora, comparable corpora, representativeness, legal translation, institutional translation
Article outline
- Introduction: Corpus-based legal translation studies
- Tailoring corpus design to research goals: A comparative overview
- Concluding remarks
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References
This article is available free of charge.
References (27)
Baker, Mona. 1993. “Corpus Linguistics and Translation Studies. Implications and Applications.” Text and Technology: In Honour of John Sinclair, edited by Mona Baker, Gill Francis, and Elena Tognini-Bonelli, 233–250. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 
. 1995. “Corpora in Translation Studies: An Overview and Some Suggestions for Future Research.” Target 7 (2): 223–243.
Bhatia, Vijay Kumar, Nicola Langton, and Jane Lung. 2004. “Legal Discourse: Opportunities and Threats for Corpus Linguistics.” Discourse in the Professions. Perspectives from Corpus Linguistics, edited by Ulla Connor, and Thomas A. Upton, 203–231. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Biber, Douglas, and Federica Barbieri. 2007. “Lexical Bundles in University Spoken and Written Registers.” English for Specific Purposes 26 (3): 263–286.
Biel, Łucja. 2014. Lost in the Eurofog: The Textual Fit of Translated Law. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
. 2016. “Mixed Corpus Design for Researching the Eurolect: A Genre-based Comparable-parallel Corpus in the PL EUROLECT Project.” Polskojęzyczne korpusy równoległe. Polish-language Parallel Corpora, edited by Ewa Gruszczyńska, and Agnieszka Leńko-Szymańska, 197–208. Warsaw: Instytut Lingwistyki Stosowanej.
. 2017. “Researching Legal Translation: A Multi-perspective and Mixed-method Framework for Legal Translation.” Revista de Llengua i Dret / Journal of Language and Law 681: 76–88.
. 2018. “Corpora in Institutional Legal Translation: Small Steps and the Big Picture.” Institutional Translation for International Governance: Enhancing Quality in Multilingual Legal Communication, edited by Fernando Prieto Ramos, 25–36. London: Bloomsbury.
Biel, Łucja, and Jan Engberg. 2013. “Research Models and Methods in Legal Translation.” Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series – Themes in Translation Studies 121: 1–11.
Cerutti, Giorgina. 2017. “Evaluating Tools for Legal Translation Research Needs: The Case of Fourth-generation Concordancers.” Legal Translation and Court Interpreting: Ethical Values, Quality, Competence Training, edited by Annikki Liimatainen, Arja Nurmi, Marja Kivilehto, Leena Salmi, Anu Viljanmaa, and Melissa Wallace, 357–391. Berlin: Frank and Timme.
Cronin, Michael. 2010. “The Translation Crowd.” Revista Tradumàtica 81. Accessed 18 December, 2018. [URL].
Koester, Almut. 2010. “Building Small Specialised Corpora.” The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics, edited by Michael McCarthy, and Anne O’Keeffe, 66–79. Abingdon: Routledge.
Laviosa, Sara. 2002. Corpus-Based Translation Studies: Theory, Findings, Applications. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
McEnery, Tony, Richard Xiao, and Yukio Tono. 2006. Corpus-based Language Studies: An Advanced Resource Book. London and New York: Routledge.
Monzó Nebot, Esther. 2008. “Corpus-based Activities in Legal Translator Training.” The Interpreter and Translator Trainer 2 (2): 221–251.
Mori, Laura (ed). 2018. Observing Eurolects. Corpus Analysis of Linguistic Variation in EU Law, Studies in Corpus Linguistics. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Olohan, Maeve. 2004. Introducing Corpora in Translation Studies. London: Routledge.
Pontrandolfo, Gianluca. 2012. “Legal Corpora: An Overview.” Rivista Internazionale di Tecnica della Traduzione 141: 121–136.
Prieto Ramos, Fernando. 2014a. “Legal Translation Studies as Interdiscipline: Scope and Evolution.” Meta: Translators’ Journal 59 (2): 260–277.
. 2014b. “International and Supranational Law in Translation: From Multilingual Lawmaking to Adjudication.” The Translator 20 (3): 313–331.
Prieto Ramos, Fernando, and Diego Guzmán. 2018. “Legal Terminology Consistency and Adequacy as Quality Indicators in Institutional Translation: A Mixed-Method Comparative Study.” Institutional Translation for International Governance: Enhancing Quality in Multilingual Legal Communication, edited by Fernando Prieto Ramos, 81–101. London: Bloomsbury.
Simonnæs, Ingrid, and Sunniva Whittaker. 2013. “The Bergen Translation Corpus TK-NHH – Design and Applications.” The Many Facets of Corpus Linguistics in Bergen – In Honour of Knut Hofland (special issue of Bergen Language and Linguistics Studies, vol. 3), edited by Lidun Hareide, Christer Johansson, and Michael Oakes, 93–106. Bergen: University of Bergen.
Snell-Hornby, Mary. 2006. The Turns of Translation Studies. New Paradigms or Shifting Viewpoints? Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Tognini-Bonelli, Elena. 2001. Corpus Linguistics at Work. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Trklja, Aleksandar, and Karen McAuliffe. 2018. “The European Union Case Law Corpus (EUCLCORP): A Multilingual Parallel and Comparative Corpus of EU Court Judgments.” Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Corpus-Based Research in the Humanities: CRH-2, edited by Andrew U. Frank, Christine Ivanovic, Francesco Mambrini, Marco Passarotti, and Caroline Sporleder, 217–226. Vienna: Gerastree Proceedings.
Vanden Bulcke, Patricia. 2013. “Dealing with Deontic Modality in a Termbase: The Case of Dutch and Spanish Legal Language.” Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series – Themes in Translation Studies 121: 12–32.
Zanettin, Federico. 2012. Translation-Driven Corpora. Corpus Resources for Descriptive and Applied Translation Studies. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing.
Cited by (5)
Cited by five other publications
Farhan, Athil Khaleel
2023. Divergence in the translation of criminal law: A corpus-based study of prohibition in Iraqi penal code and its English translation. Ampersand 10 ► pp. 100104 ff. 
Killman, Jeffrey
2023. Rendering Morphosyntactic Features of Legal Spanish Judgments Using Neural and Statistical Machine Translation. In New Advances in Legal Translation and Interpreting [New Frontiers in Translation Studies, ], ► pp. 221 ff.
Laviosa, Sara & Gaetano Falco
2023. Corpora and Translator Education: Past, Present, and Future. In Corpora and Translation Education [New Frontiers in Translation Studies, ], ► pp. 9 ff.
Robertson, Colin D. & Mairtin Mac Aodha
2023. Legal terminology of the European Union. In Handbook of Terminology [Handbook of Terminology, 3], ► pp. 244 ff.
Prieto Ramos, Fernando & Diego Guzmán
2021. Examining institutional translation through a legal lens. Target. International Journal of Translation Studies 33:2 ► pp. 254 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 19 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.