专著推荐 | 经典读本《实证翻译研究：跨学科方法探索》纪萌主编

The corpus study of lexicography and phraseology represents mainstream research in applied translation studies and multilingual studies. It has provided a focus of significant research in the field which explores the validity and productivity of corpus methods and approaches to the study of lexical events in translations. This volume provides an updated introduction to the interdisciplinary corpus study of lexicography in translation, whereas many past publications focus on a specific approach, for example, cognitive, stylistic or computational to the study of translation and/or multilingual lexis. The interdisciplinary research approaches presented in this book regarding the extraction, modeling, analysis and explanation of the use of lexis and phrase in translation and multilingual texts offer a practical study guide to postgraduate and research students of applied translation studies.

This volume focuses on the development of advanced research methodologies for empirical translation studies which include both corpus-based and corpus-driven approaches to translation products and related social and cultural phenomena. Since the introduction of language corpora to translation studies in the 1990s, the descriptive branch of translation studies has seen rapid development mainly due to the experimentation with a variety of corpus materials and corpus methodologies. A distinct feature of current empirical translation studies is the integration of corpus methods with established research techniques used in applied linguistics and literary studies, such as contrastive linguistics, quantitative linguistics and stylistics. Chapters in this book make useful attempts to explore the potential of corpus research methods to advance emerging cutting-edge research areas such as multimedia and multimodal translation. The combined use of language corpora and research methods borrowed from cognate fields has given rise to new research areas such as corpus translation stylistics, quantitative translation studies, and empirical multimodal translation studies. An important feature shared by these rapidly growing areas of empirical translation studies is that they are highly interdisciplinary, exploratory and experimental, with a strong focus on the development of robust and empirically verifiable research methodologies. In this way, new analytical models proposed and developed for translation studies will be technically modifiable and theoretical extensible, as language processing technologies continue to push back the frontier of the development of multilingual and translational corpus resources. From a theoretical perspective, the significance of the exploration and establishment of advanced research methodologies is that they can assist translation scholars effectively in the identification and retrieval of useful linguistic units and textual patterns in large-scale translational and multilingual corpora to advance our understanding of translation as a highly purposeful cross-cultural activity and profession which drives the evolving process of globalisation. The study of textual and linguistic patterns in translation lies at the heart of influential contemporary translation theories such as translation norms, laws and universal features since the 1970s. The insight is shared by contributors to this book that many important translation phenomena or recurring corpus patterns that reveal important relations between different sets of contextual and textual factors in translation remain unexplored or have been investigated only to a limited extent due to a lack of robust corpus analytical techniques in empirical translation studies. Ever since the 1990s, the identification and verification of revealing and widely existing corpus patterns has prepared the ground for the theoretical development of translation studies as an academic discipline. This book builds upon the momentum of existing corpus translation studies by offering a set of original research papers by world-leading translation scholars. Their work illustrates the application of advanced corpus analytical techniques in the study of the translation of a variety of textual genres involving a wide range of language combinations: FinnishRussian, Chinese-English, Polish-English, Greek-English, Italian-English and Brazilian Portuguese-English. The four main sets of corpus methodologies explored in this book include: (1) the keyword analysis of translation (Shuttleworth; Kemppanen and Mäkisalo) which applies computer-assisted keyword analysis in the exploration of comparable and parallel corpora; (2) the corpus-based study of stylistic variations in translation (Li and Wang; Pantopoulos); (3) the corpus-driven quantitative study of translation (Pagano et al.; Vandevoorde et al.); and (4) the systematic processing of multimedia translation corpora that cover a range of genres such as learners’ corpora, TV series and documentaries (Baczkowska; Bonsignori and Bruti; Deckert). These four areas represent some of the most dynamic fields of corpus translation research which prioritise the exploration and experimentation with advanced research methodologies in empirical translation studies As empirical translation studies evolves with advances made in research methodologies, there are a number of issues that seem to divide scholarly efforts in this growing area. One of them is the so-called dichotomy between corpus-based and corpus-driven approaches to translation. It is argued in this book that the two sets of research methods which are both valid in dealing with specific research problems can be integrated effectively to advance empirical translation studies. While the corpus-based approach works well in verifying and revising existing theoretical hypotheses, the corpus-driven approach is particularly useful in the development and testing of new analytical constructs and models as new evidence and textual patterns continue to emerge from computer-aided corpus processing and modelling. It is truly hoped that this latest addition to corpus translation research will contribute to the ongoing debates on developing advanced research methodologies for empirical translation studies. 

The major contribution of this volume is that it illustrates the potential of translation studies for interdisciplinary research. The variety of approaches explored by each of the chapters is inspiring, and it will certainly provide food for thought both to the novice and the expert reader. Despite the diversity of style, structure, topic, and accessibility (in terms of expertise required from the reader), all of the articles contribute to the methodological innovation and empirical development that translation studies is currently going through. In this respect, this volume hits the nail right on the head, in reflecting an up-to-date and undoubtedly refreshing account of the field as it is shifting towards interdisciplinarity and empiricism.