ABSTRACT
A corpus is a collection of texts in electronic form that are the object of literary or linguistic study. Such collections normally include vast quantities of texts , that can be searched by means of fast and flexible dedicated software applications known as corpus query tools, corpus analysis tools or concordancers. Best practice in corpus creation requires designers to make informed decisions on the types of language they wish to include in their corpora, and in which proportions. Design criteria crucially depend on the envisaged use of the corpus but have, in the past, centred on the idea that corpora should somehow be ‘representative’ of a particular type of language production and/or reception. Several scholars have proposed corpus typologies that are of particular relevance to translation studies. A number of variations on the basic design are possible: a bilingual parallel corpus can be unidirectional or bidirectional, for instance.
