ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at how corpora have changed translation studies and translation practice over the past decades. Translation scholars and practising translators can now greatly benefit from the rapid technological progress that enables large quantities of data to be stored and manipulated. The chapter examines different types of corpus work and discusses some practical examples. Corpora are today fruitfully used to help make the concept of equivalence through empirical work less subjective, especially if the corpus represents a variety of translators. Translation corpora provide a reliable tool for clarifying hypothesized equivalences and for establishing reliable patterns of translation regularities. While constructions featuring complex grammatical processes of nominalization and abstraction are usually associated with written language, concrete descriptions of events and states of affairs characterize spoken varieties of a language.
