It is not only the concept of translation universals that has been questioned and debated, but also the possible ? or desirable ? nature of research approaches that might be used to investigate their existence. While it is clear that the chief value of research into this topic lies in deepening a general understanding of translation and contributing to translation theory, it is equally clear that methodological monism is unlikely to take us very far. The discussion so far has touched upon different possibilities of methodological choice, although the bulk of actual empirical research has been of a relatively uniform kind. The approaches featuring in these discussions have been linguistic, cognitive and social. The first two relate to the categories of translation product and translation process. The third draws on sociocultural research, which has often been hostile to general laws, but may conceivably contribute to generalisations as well ? at least by pointing out their limits.

Most research into translation universals has been linguistically oriented. The study of universals originated in corpus studies: corpus methods are well suited for the discovery of large-scale tendencies, and can therefore be expected to continue to play a major role in universals research. Corpora have benefited traditional parallel text research by providing a much larger number of examples than earlier. Large numbers help us get beyond individual translators' idiosyncrasies, reveal typicality as well as variation, and help detect the truly unique.

A radical new departure has been the comparable translation corpus. Because these corpora do not allow access to source texts, they really focus attention on target texts and target languages. They have also made it possible to compare translations from different sources into one target language. The similarities that are discovered between translations from different sources but which differ from target language originals provide candidates for a number of universals; conversely, characteristics which single out one source language are likely to be caused by interference. It is important that comparable corpora include a variety of source languages, in order to distinguish that which is common to translations in general, and to make possible a comparison of different target languages to discover that which is specific to a language pair.

A cognitive approach has been invoked as a model for explaining the linguistic characteristics discovered by other means. So far the explanations have remained at the level of theoretical discussion, but cognitive models give rise to other kinds of empirical work, notably think-aloud-protocols (TAPs) (see, for example Alves, 2003; Ja¨a¨skela¨inen, 1999). The translator's cognitive processes are seen as the mediating element which accounts for the shifts that are linguistically manifest in the text. In explaining corpus findings, some scholars make reference to cognitive concepts like the translator's bilingual mental dictionary, while others seem to be searching for suitable cognitive concepts even if they describe the processes at a more common-sense level, and discuss translators' tendencies to translate word for word, or to translate that which is stimulated by the source text. There is clearly a need to model linguistic findings in process terms.