Corpus studies in conference interpreting

Abstract

Research into conference interpreting has drawn on corpus methods since the early developments of the corpus-based approach in interpreting studies. Overviews of major projects in corpus-based interpreting studies clearly show that interpreting corpora have been increasing in number and size over the last few decades, covering a variety of language combinations, interpreting modes and settings. Overall, conference interpreting corpora range from small data sets used for qualitative ‘manual’ analysis to larger, machine-readable corpora, some of which are also accessible online. The systematic observations afforded by corpus methods have allowed interpreting scholars to study different features of conference interpreting with reference to source speeches and other translation modes, combining a variety of methods (e.g. statistical testing, comparable and parallel use of corpora, discourse analysis). Although corpus construction is still considered a daunting task, the corpus-based approach has become a well-established paradigm in conference interpreting research, with interesting applications to interpreting education.