Translating and Comparing Languages: Corpus-based Insights

Book excerpt: The present volume contains selected proceedings from the fifth edition of the Using Corpora in Contrastive and Translation Studies (UCCTS) international conference held at the University of Louvain in September 2018. It brings together thirteen chapters that all make use of electronic comparable and/or parallel corpora to inform contrastive linguistics, translation theory, translation pedagogy, translation quality assessment and multilingual terminology. The volume is structured in five thematic sections, devoted to learner-focused descriptive translation studies, corpus use in translator training, studies of translated and edited language, contrastive linguistics, and terminology. Together, the contributions in the volume reflect recent developments in corpus-based cross-linguistic studies, such as the compilation and analysis of learner translation corpora to identify the typical features of learner translated language and inform translator training, the comparative analysis of translation and other forms of mediated communication, such as editing, the compilation of new multilingual corpora and the analysis of under-researched linguistic phenomena, such as punctuation. The volume also testifies to the growing cross-fertilization between contrastive linguistics and translation studies, both in terms of methodology (e.g. the combined use of different types of corpora and the exploration of corpus-driven methods) and theory (e.g. the role played by source language influence and cross-linguistic contrasts in translation).