ABSTRACT
This chapter is devoted to a recent influential development in translation studies: corpora and how they have changed translation research and practice over the past decades. In the last analysis, the object of corpus translation studies should not be the explanation of what is present in the corpus, but the understanding of translation. The aim of a corpus is not to limit the data to an allegedly representative sample, but to provide a framework for finding out what sort of questions should be asked about translation and about language used in different ways. Corpus studies are not a new branch of translation studies, but simply a methodological basis for pursuing translation research. An influence of English on German texts would manifest itself in quantitative and qualitative changes in the use of certain linguistic items and structures in German translations and comparable texts in genres where Anglophone dominance is particularly noticeable, such as popular science or business texts.
