The treatment of variation in corpus-based translation studies

Abstract

Corpus-based research in translation studies initially focused on similarities and differences between translated and non-translated text, in an attempt to demonstrate that translations form a distinctive textual system within any target culture. More recently, researchers have begun to turn their attention to the question of individual variation within any corpus of translations. This article focuses on the latter strand of investigation and presents two small-scale studies which highlight such variation: one based on material from the European Union and the other on a subset of literary texts in the Translational English Corpus. It ends with an overview of the features of individual variation discussed in the literature and argues that the next stage of development in corpus-based translation studies must address the challenge of elaborating robust models for the systematic analysis of stylistic variation across translators of both literary and non-literary text.