ABSTRACT
In 1993, Mona Baker’s paper ‘Corpus Linguistics and Translation Studies: Implications and Application’ signalled the beginning of a new era in translation studies. Baker proposed the ‘corpus-based investigation’ in translation studies, which developed later from a methodology into ‘a new paradigm’ (Laviosa 1998a) – corpus-based translation studies (CTS). Based on various corpora composed of large-scale authentic machine-readable translation-related texts, the new branch, which is descriptive in nature, aims at explorations into translation performance involved in all types of translation, including how translators make use of the target language in their translations and what kind of linguistic regularity or probability is demonstrated in the bilingual transfer between different languages. For more than 20 years, CTS has already explored a series of research topics such as (universal) features of translated language or translation universals, translator’s style, translational norms, diachronic changes of target language, etc. The new paradigm has been developing both methodologically and technologically. This chapter offers an overview of CTS in the Chinese context in the past decades, which can be divided into four major stages, namely introducing period, corpora building and related researches, hypotheses testing in the Chinese–English context, further development and prospect.
