ABSTRACT
Corpora in translation studies Corpus linguistics is the branch of linguistics that studies language on the basis of corpora, i.e. , ' bodies of texts assembled in a principled way ' (Johansson 1995: 1 9). A text, in tum, can be defined as 'an instance of language in use , either spoken or written: a piece of langu age behaviour which has occurred naturally , without the intervention of the linguist' (Stubbs 1 996: 4). Corpus linguists thus take an empirical approach to the description of langu age: they insist upon the primacy of authentic , attested instances of use , an approach which has been mirrored in recent years by develop ments in descriptive translation studies. For example, scholars such as Holmes ( 1 988: 1 0 1 ) have expressed dissatisfaction with the use of introspection by translation theorists , and Toury ( 1 980a: 79-8 1 ) has decried approaches that view translations as idealized, speculative entities , rather than observable facts. Toury ( 1 980a: 8 1 ) concedes that isolated attempts have been made to describe and explain actual translations but calls for a whole method ological apparatus that would make individual studies transparent and repeatable. In this regard he shares the same concerns as corpus linguists such as Atkins et al. ( 1 992), Engwall ( 1994), Sinclair ( 1 99 1 ) and Stubbs ( 1 993 , 1 995 , 1996), who have variously addressed issues like corpus composition and bias , the complementary roles of intuition and observa tion in linguistic research, and the limitations of the computational and statistical tools cur rently in use in the processing of corpora. And although Toury ( 1980a: 6 1 ) bemoaned the lack of ' strict statistical methods for dealing with translational norms, or even to supply sam pling rules for actual research' in the mid1 970s , much has been achieved in corpus linguistics since then, and theorists such as Baker ( 1 993 , 1995 , 1 997 ) have been instru mental not only in incorporating the methods and tools of corpus linguistics into descriptive translation studies , but also in highlighting the particular challenges that translation poses for corpus studies. Before moving on to the specific details of corpus-based translation
studies , however, it is worth mentioning some issues of interest to both translation-oriented and general corpus studies.
