The corpus approach: a common way forward for Contrastive Linguistics and Translation Studies?

In this introductory chapter, Granger traces the development of Contrastive Linguistics and Translation Studies over the last decades to the present day, focusing on the role of the computer corpus in giving new impetus to each field and bringing them closer together. She discusses the different types of monolingual and multilingual corpora being used in CL and TS research, proposing at the same time a common corpus terminology. She then relates the contribution of the different corpus types to the major research interests of each discipline, highlighting the complementarity of the research and calling for increased cross-fertilization and resource-pooling. She then examines the practical issues of corpus exploitation, with a review of corpus analysis tools of particular value for CL and TS and finally, the contribution of corpus-based CL and TS research in the teaching of foreign languages and translation. 0. Contrastive Linguistics and Translation Studies, two converging disciplines Although the disciplines of Contrastive Linguistics (CL) and Translation Studies (TS) cover partly common ground, it is only recently, with the emergence of corpora, that they have started to converge. This rapprochement is apparent from recent publications and conferences that have brought together specialists from the two fields, bearing witness to the vitality of multilingual studies in general. The history of Contrastive Linguistics has been characterized by a pattern of success-decline-success. CL was originally a purely applied enterprise, aiming to produce more efficient foreign language teaching methods and tools. Based on the general assumption that difference equals difficulty, CL, which in those days was called Contrastive Analysis (CA), consisted in charting areas of similarity and difference between languages and basing the teaching syllabus on the contrastive findings. Advances in the understanding of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) mechanisms led to a questioning of the very basis of CA. Interlingual factors were found to be less prevalent than other factors, among which intralingual mechanisms such as the overgeneralization of target rules and external factors such as the influence of teaching methods or personal factors like motivation. This led to the decline of CA, but not to its death. At first, it gave rise to some drastic pedagogical decisions, which in some cases culminated in a total ban of the mother tongue in FL teaching. But research (see Odlin 1989, Selinker 1992, James 1998) re-established transfer as a major – if not the major – factor in SLA, which in turn led to a progressive – albeit limited – return of contrastive