Using Corpora in Contrastive and Translation Studies

Reviews / Votes

'This book provides firm evidence for the "coming of age" of corpus-based approaches to both translation and contrastive language studies. This book provides a host of examples of why any serious researcher in these fields should embrace the corpus-based approach as a matter of priority.' - Professor Tony McEnery, Lancaster University, UK'The use of electronic corpora is transforming more and more fields in the study of language, including contrastive and translation studies, providing new insight into language relationships and characteristics of translation. Apart from showing the wide range of issues in current research, the present volume is significant with respect to the number and variety of languages included: Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Persian, Portuguese, Spanish, Tok Pisin, and Uygur. The book represents an important step forward compared with previous corpus-based contrastive and translation studies, which have tended to focus on a limited number of (chiefly European) languages.' - Professor Stig Johansson, University of Oslo, Norway'This is an important book that provides us with a wealth of empirical evidence derived from a broad range of genres, languages and translation modalities. It builds on established corpus-based methodologies and explores new avenues of scholarly enquiry that are of true value to the international research community.' - Sara Laviosa, University of Bari, Italy"'Using Corpora in Contrastive and Translation Studies' by Richard Xiao represents the frontier of research in corpus-assisted language research and teaching in a large part of the world including continental Europe and the UK. It more-over deals with regions where English language teaching and research is thriving such as China and the Chinese-speaking research community worldwide. This book demonstrates that corpora are playing an ever important role in advancing research methods and approaches in applied linguistics. With its own scientific orientations and priorities, the use of corpora has greatly promoted the development of new lines of scientific inquiries in empirical language studies as shown by the research papers collected in this volume. It is bleieved that with the technical sophistication of language databases and resources in the era of digitization and computation, the innovative use and exploration of corpora will continue to offer us novel and much-needed insights into the behaviour of human languages and thoughts in naturally occurring contexts against different social and cultural backgrounds." - Meng Ji, 'Target' 25:2 (2013), 301-305