Corpus methods in legal translation studies

Abstract

The present chapter provides an overview of some corpus methods adopted in Legal Translation Studies (LTS). In fact, corpora have become a crucial tool to study legal language and translation as well as a mainstream methodology (Biel 2010). The potential of corpus linguistics for researching legal language and translation (Biel 2010; Goźdź-Roszkowski 2011) and as a tool in translator training (Monzo Nebot 2008; Biel 2010) is unquestionable. This chapter discusses the usefulness of legal corpora (Pontrandolfo 2012; Marin Perez and Rea Rizzo 2012; Vogel et al. 2017; Biel 2018a) for LTS by presenting some research conducted with the use of different but complementary methods. The studies mentioned in the chapter are analysed through the lens of methodological dichotomies (i.e. local versus global, quantity versus quality, corpus-based versus corpus-driven, monolingual versus multilingual, comparable versus parallel, translated versus non-translated), which demonstrates the importance of eclecticism in the selection of corpus methods in LTS. The overview shows that there is a growing number of studies using corpora of legal texts and the methodologies adopted are increasingly diversified, even though there are areas which need to be further investigated (e.g. translation universals) which will hopefully contribute to new research developments in LTS.