As Laviosa (1998a) observes, 'the corpus-based approach is evolving, through theoretical elaborations and empirical realisation, into a coherent, composite and rich paradigm that addresses a variety of issues pertaining to theory, description, and the practice of translation'. Corpus-based translation studies come in two broad areas: theoretical and practical (Hunston, 2002: 123). In theoretical terms, corpora are used mainly to study the translation process by exploring how an idea in one language is conveyed in another language and by comparing the linguistic features and their frequencies in translated L2 texts and comparable L1 texts. In the practical approach, corpora provide a workbench for training translators and a basis for developing applications like MT and computer-assisted translation (CAT) systems. In this section, we will discuss how corpora have been used in each of these areas.
Parallel corpora are a good basis for studying how an idea in one language is conveyed in another language. Xiao and McEnery (2002a), for example, use an English?Chinese parallel corpus containing 100,170 English words and 192,088 Chinese characters to explore how temporal and aspectual meanings in English are expressed in Chinese. In that study, the authors found that while both English and Chinese have a progressive aspect, the progressive has different scopes of meaning in the two languages. In English, while the progressive canonically (93.5%) signals the ongoing nature of a situation (e.g. John is singing,Comrie, 1976: 32), it has anumber of other specific uses that do not seem to fit under the general definition of 'progressiveness' (Comrie, 1976: 37). These 'specific uses' include its use to indicate contingent habitual or iterative situations (e.g. I'm taking dancing lessons this winter,Leech, 1971: 27), to indicate anticipated happenings in the future (for instance, We’re visiting Aunt Rose tomorrow, p. 29) and some idiomatic use to add special emotive effect (for instance, I'm continually forgetting people's names,p. 29) (c.f. Leech, 1971: 27?29). In Chinese, however, the progressive marked by zai only corresponds to the first category above, namely, to mark the ongoing nature of dynamic situations. As such, only about 58% of situations referred to by the progressive in the English source data take the progressive or the durative aspect, either marked overtly or covertly, in Chinese translations. The authors also found that the interaction between situation aspect (that is the inherent aspectual features of a situation, for instance, whether the situation has a natural final endpoint) and viewpoint aspect (for example, perfective versus imperfective) also influences a translator's choice of viewpoint aspect. Situations with a natural final endpoint (around 65%) and situations incompatible with progressiveness (92.5.% of individual-level states and 75.9% of achievements) are more likely to undergo viewpoint aspect shift and be presented perfectively in Chinese translations. In contrast, situations without a natural final endpoint are normally translated with the progressive marked by zai or the durative aspect marked by -zhe.
Note, however, that the direction of translation in a parallel corpus is important in studies of this kind. The corpus used in Xiao and McEnery (2002a), for example, is not suitable for studying how aspect markers in Chinese are translated into English. For that purpose, a Chinese-English parallel corpus (that is L1 Chinese plus L2 English) is required.
Another problem that arises with the use of a one-to-one parallel corpus (that is containing only one version of translation in the target language) is that the translation only represents 'one individual's introspection, albeit contextually and cotextually informed' (Malmkj?r, 1998). One possible way to overcome this problem, as suggested in Malmkj?r, is to include as many versions of a translation of the same source text as possible. While this solution is certainly of benefit to translation studies, it makes the task of building parallel corpora much more difficult. It also reduces the range of data one may include in a parallel corpus, as many translated texts are translated once only. It is typically texts such as literary works where multiple translations of the same work are available. These works tend to be non-contemporary and the different versions of translation are usually spaced decades apart, thus making the comparison of these versions less
meaningful.
The distinctive features of translated language can be identified by comparing the translations with comparable L1 texts, thus throwing new light on the translation process and helping to identify translation norms. Laviosa (1998b), for example, in her study of L1 and L2 English narrative prose, finds that translated L2 language has four core patterns of lexical use: a relatively lower proportion of lexical words over function words, a relatively higher proportion of high-frequency words over low-frequency words, relatively greater repetition of the most frequent words and less variety in the words that are most frequently used. Other studies show that translated language is characterised, beyond the lexical level, by normalisation, simplification (Baker, 1993, 1998), explicitation (that is increased cohesion, ?′ verla?s, 1998) and sanitisation (i.e. reduced connotational meanings, Kenny, 1998). As these features are regular and typical of translated English, further research based upon these findings may not only uncover the translational norms or what Frawley (1984) calls the 'third code' of translation, it will also help translators and trainee translators to become aware of these problems.
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