This article argues that up until the advent of computerized corpora, studies of simplification have been, on the whole, isolated, small-scale, genre- and language-pair specific projects which have not yielded a coherent set of findings in support of simplification as a universal of translation. Corpus-based research hypothesizes that simplification typically occurs in translated rather than original text and is independent of the influence of the specific language pairs involved in the process of translation. Moreover it has developed a methodology for investigating simplification in a systematic way and has begun to collect empirical evidence on substantial and varied amounts of data.