Principles of corpus linguistics and their application to translation studies research

Corpora have been put to many different uses in fields as varied as natural language processing, critical discourse analysis and applied linguistics, to mention just a few. As is to be expected, within each of those areas corpora fulfil different roles, from providing data to build statistical machine translation systems to revealing ideological stance in politicallysensitive texts. ‘Corpus linguistics’ is understood here in a more restricted sense, linked to British traditions of text analysis that see linguistics as a social science and language as a means of social interaction where meaning is inextricably linked to the cultural and historical context in which it is produced. This article focuses specifically on the principles of corpus linguistics as a research methodology, and looks at the implications of this specific approach to the study of language in translation studies.