Corpus studies of translation universals: A critical appraisal

Although the notion of translation universals has recently been the object of lively debate, there is no doubt that the introduction of electronic corpora in translation studies has acted as a stimulus to empirical research into general regularities in translational language. Indeed, thanks to the availability of parallel and comparable corpora in a growing number of languages, corpus-based studies have refined and diversified descriptive research into simplification, explicitation and normalization. This paper offers a critical review of some of the main studies carried out in this expanding area of scholarly enquiry.