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. Translation corpora provide a reliable tool for clarifying hypothesized equivalences and for establishing reliable patterns of translation regularities. Corpus data are useful because they are often better data than those derived from accidental introspections, and for the study of certain problems, such as overall development of the use of modal verbs, corpus data are indeed the only available data. The two linking constructions for example and for instance are prepositional phrases which, broadly speaking, function to specify what has been said before, and are rather typical of the popular science genre. Much more longitudinal corpus-based research is needed, taking account of a host of different factors that influence language variation and change through language contact in translation.
