The Role of Corpora in Investigating the Linguistic Behaviour of Professional Translators

Abstract

The Translational English Corpus held at the Centre for Translation Studies at UMIST is a computerised collection of authentic, published translations into English from a variety of source languages and by a wide range of professional translators. This resource provides the basis for investigating a range of issues related to the distinctive nature of translated text, the style of individual translators, the impact of individual source languages on the patterning of English, the impact of text type on translation strategies, and other issues of interest to both the translation scholar and the linguist. Most importantly, this concrete resource allows us to develop a framework for investigating the validity of theoretical statements about the nature of translation with reference to actual translation practice.