The Pervasiveness of Corpora in Translation Studies

We take the view that, in order to appraise the advances made in any field of knowledge at a given point in time, it is important to revisit the past and view it through the lens of present achievements. Consequently, in this paper we trace the development of Corpus-based Translation Studies (CBTS) from its origin to the present day by surveying landmark publications and international events. We then make some recommendations for the future. Our aim is to show that the pervasiveness of corpus use in the pure and applied branches of Translation Studies is the result of a gradual process of integration of theory-driven and application-driven research. Indeed, the integration of translation theory, description and practice is, we believe, a hallmark of corpus research today and one of its main achievements. We contend that, if we are to make further advances in this area of scientific enquiry, we should endeavour to harmonize
the concerns of professional translators, translator trainees, translator trainers, and translation scholars. The first author provides an overview of corpus use in Translation Studies from the early 1990s to the first decade of the new millennium. The second author assesses the state of the art of corpus studies of translation over the last ten years. In the concluding section, we jointly summarize the main points we covered throughout the paper and then look forward to the future.