Corpora in Translation Studies: An Overview and Some Suggestions for Future Research

Mona Baker
UMIST & Middlesex University
Abstract

Corpus-based research has become widely accepted as a factor in improving the performance of machine translation systems, and corpus-based terminology compilation is now the norm rather than the exception. Within translation studies proper, Lindquist (1984) has advocated the use of corpora for training translators, and Baker (1993a) has argued that theoretical research into the nature of translation will receive a powerful impetus from corpus-based studies. It is becoming increasingly important to take stock of what is happening on this front and to start working towards the development of an explicit and coherent methodology for corpus-based research in the discipline. This paper discusses the current and potential use of corpora in translation studies, with particular reference to theoretical issues.

Table of contents

The potential for using corpora is beginning to take shape in translation studies. Computerised corpora are becoming increasingly popular in those areas of the discipline which have close links with the hard sciences. This is particularly true of terminology and machine translation, where the emphasis is primarily, if not exclusively, on scientific and technical texts.

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