Granger, Sylviane and Lefer, Marie-Aude, eds. (2022): Extending the Scope of Corpus-Based Translation Studies. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 289 p.

The past thirty years have produced a rich body of corpus-based research and ground-breaking advances in contrastive linguistics and translation studies since Baker (1993) envisaged Corpus-based Translation Studies (CBTS). Recently, the field of corpus-based translation and interpreting studies has gradually expanded in methodology, theory, analysis and applications. It is within this context that the present volume, co-edited by Sylviane Granger (Professor of the English language and linguistics, University of Louvain) and Marie-Aude Lefer (Associate Professor of Translation Studies and English-French translation, University of Louvain), offers an in-time and in-depth survey of the latest developments and trends and shows potential future perspectives and orientations for the development of CBTS. Besides an introduction and an index, this volume includes four main sections, entitled: Corpus-based Translation Studies: Current challenges and future perspectives (Part I), Recent methodological and theoretical developments in CBTS (Part II), Corpus-based empirical studies (Part III), and Corpus use in translator training (Part IV). The volume opens with a section focusing on the trends, the challenges and the future of CBTS. One paper focuses on the current state, the other expounds the gaps and challenges. The first paper “Corpus-based translation and interpreting studies: A forward-looking review” is contributed by Sylviane Granger and Marie-Aude Lefer. They carry out a thorough survey of corpus-based translation and interpreting studies, based on 186 recent articles (2012-19) in 12 scientific journals written in English. Automatic extraction and manual filtering of the data reveals an upward trend in this field (p. 20), with empirical studies accounting for two thirds while applied and methodological-theoretical ones lag far behind (p. 21). A detailed analysis shows that translation universals, namely, explicitation, normalisation and simplification are the most investigated. The study relies heavily on parallel corpora and basic techniques such as frequency and concordances, while more advanced techniques, such as multivariate methods have received much less attention. The authors point out that the survey is only partial, as it is limited to journal articles written in English (p. 37), but that it is still helpful for suggestions on future developments in CBTS. Federico Gaspari follows with an overview and analysis in “Expanding the reach of corpus-based translation studies: The opportunities that lie ahead.” The author reviews the development of CBTS in the last three decades, particularly the key areas of translation theory and corpus methodology. In terms of translation theory in CBTS, its focus extends from translation universals (explicitation in particular) to mediation universals, among which directionality plays a key role. Regarding methodology, the author recommends to scholars in CBTS to leave their comfort zone. In digital times, it is imperative for CBTS to challenge the traditional translation methods, namely, the well-established methods of adopting comparable and parallel corpora and employ novel approaches to extend translation areas in investigating data produced on the Internet, app and streaming TV (p. 50). Part II deals with recent methodological and theoretical developments in CBTS. In the first paper, Haidee Kotze constructs a constrained-language framework to explore the similarities and differences between constrained-language varieties and native varieties. After providing an overview of the rationale for the constrained-language framework, the author constructs a model with macro-level and micro-level constraints, aiming to generalise the factors that shape language use in constrained language or communication contexts. Taking the complementizer that in three varieties of English (English original, translated English from Afrikaans and South African English) as a case study, based on the corpus of five registers, random forests analysis and conditional inference tree suggest that translators are more likely to opt for the explicit that than writers across the three varieties (p. 89). It is an advancement that …