The use of corpus analysis in the research of universals of translation and in the investigation of the style of translators

The following paper will analyse the aims and the development in the application of corpus analysis in Translation Studies, focusing in particular on the research projects carried out by the Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies at the University of Manchester (former Centre for Translation Studies at UMIST), between 1993 and 2000. It will explain how these projects applied corpus based methods for the identification of universal features of translation and for the study of individual translators’ style, outlining the results achieved and the future implications related to this type of researches.
The paper will also explore the purposes and the current developments of corpus analysis in Translation Studies by presenting some specific examples of translational corpora and by analysing the questions related to their design, to the interpretation of data and to the limits and constraints involved in the collection and encoding of texts (e.g. copyright permissions, funding restrictions and technical issues).
It will finally suggest some potential applications of corpora to Translation Studies, such as the use of corpus analysis for the investigation of translational features of non-European languages and for the study of the translational features of Languages for Special Purposes (LSPs).