Abstract
Abstract Exploring questions of representativeness, balance and comparability is essential to tailoring corpus design and compilation to research goals, and to ensuring the validity of research results. This is especially true when the target population of texts under examination is very large and transcends a restricted area of specialization and/or covers multiple genres, as in the case of texts translated in institutional settings. This paper describes the multilayered sequential approach to corpus building applied in a comparative study on legal translation in three of these settings. The approach is based on a full mapping and categorization of institutional texts from a legal perspective; it applies an innovative combination of stratified sampling techniques integrating quantitative and qualitative criteria adapted to the research aims. The resulting corpora, categorization matrix and selection records, together with the methodological detail provided, can be useful for building other multi-genre corpora in translation studies and further afield.
Highlights
Exploring questions of representativeness, balance and comparability is essential to tailoring corpus design and compilation to research goals, and to ensuring the validity of research results
– Reports issued by the Trade Policy Review Mechanism (TPRM) Secretariat
This collection of corpora is unique because it is based on a first-of-its-kind mapping and categorization of all multilingual text production in three international institutional settings over three years, and because of the innovative combination of sampling techniques tailored to the subsequent aims of analysis of discourse features and translation patterns
Summary
Any corpus conceived for linguistic or translation research whose object of inquiry transcends a restricted area of specialization inevitably relies on text classification and selection for its design and compilation. This comprehensive overview was necessary to yield key quantitative results on translation volume for both primary and secondary institutional functions (see Table 3 below), as well as for specific genres within each functional category, and to further define the scope of legal translation in the three settings This corpora set was instrumental to generating smaller corpora, LETRINT 1 and LETRINT 1+, for a more detailed analysis of discourse features, translation patterns and quality indicators. These aims required a multi-layered, multi-stage application of stratified sampling techniques in which quantitative and qualitative criteria were adapted to the size, nature and variation of each key genre (or stratum) selected from each legal category quantified in LETRINT 0 (see Section 4). The results of corpus analysis fall beyond the scope of this article
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