Corpus-based translation studies is a relatively new area of research within translation studies, motivated by an interest in the study of translated texts as instances of language use in their own right. This is in contrast to the not uncommon perception of translations as ‘deviant’ language use, a view which has generally led to the exclusion of translated texts from most reference corpora (Baker 1999). While translations have been seen as useful in parallel bilingual or multilingual corpora, this has usually been for contrastive linguistic analysis which has studied the relationship between source and target language systems or usage. Parallel corpora are naturally also of interest to the translation scholar as they facilitate investigation of the relationship between a translation and its source text. Recent work using corpora in translation studies has, however, been more concerned with building corpora of translations so that the patterns of use of language in translations may be studied. The first corpus of this nature was the Translational English Corpus at UMIST which, since its inception, has provided a model for a number of similar projects for other languages.
