ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the development and use of corpora within audiovisual translation (AVT), exploring the methodological, theoretical and descriptive insights that corpora have originated in the field. In recent years researchers have become increasingly aware that large and principled electronic collections of audiovisual dialogue and computer-assisted methods of analysis are needed to carry out empirically validated investigations of AVT (e.g. Heiss and Soffritti 2008, Freddi and Pavesi 2009a, Baños et al. 2013, Pavesi et al. 2014). Corpus-based articles, monographs and doctoral theses have proliferated, drawing on both lower-scope data collections and larger databases that bring corpus-based research on AVT into line with other areas of Corpus-based Translation Studies (CBTS). This general approach to research on translation can be placed at the intersection between the theoretical and methodological frameworks of Descriptive Translation Studies and Corpus Linguistics since it responds to the call to look for distinctive features, patterns, norms and universals in translated texts by relying on extensive authentic data. Launched at the beginning of the 1990s by Baker’s seminal work (Baker 1993, 1996), CBTS embody an empirical, intersubjective as well as descriptive, rather than prescriptive, viewpoint on translation as developed in Toury’s (1995/2012) target-oriented polysystemic theory (Laviosa 2011).
