Intermodal corpora: A novel resource for descriptive and applied translation studies

This contribution describes EPTIC (the European Parliament Translation and Interpreting Corpus), focusing on its potential for investigating the translation process and for the education of future translators. EPTIC is an intermodal corpus, i.e. a resource that makes available for comparison samples of texts translated in different modes (in the case of EPTIC, in the written and spoken —simultaneous interpreting— modes). The fresh perspective offered by EPTIC and by intermodal corpora in general is set against the background of related corpus-based approaches that aim to unearth variation and invariance in translation choices by contrasting multiple translations of the same source texts. To exemplify the types of insights that intermodal corpora make available to both researchers and translation teachers/ students, a study of transfer operations leading to the use of collocations in English and Italian target texts is presented, a bottom-up categorization is proposed, and the different choices made by interpreters and translators working from/into Italian and English, are discussed. The examples provided illustrate cases of register shifts (greater/less formality), meaning shifts (contraction, expansion, clarification, broadening, partial and total transformation) as well as cases akin to normalization, in which the translator/interpreter seems to have opted for the use of a familiar collocation in the target language, even though, based on the source text prompt, other, more obvious choices could have been made. It is argued that, notwithstanding some inherent limits, intermodal corpora like EPTIC, featuring aligned interpreted and translated texts, offer the rare opportunity of observing decisions made by professionals when tackling similar language input in different modes and under different circumstances. Therefore, not only are they promising resources for understanding the mediation process and for the teaching of both translation and interpreting, they also provide an ideal common ground for collaboration between scholars in these two sub-fields of translation studies. It is hoped that researchers in interpreting and translation studies working with different EU language pairs see the potential of the approach and contribute to enlarging and expanding EPTIC, thus turning it into the first multilingual and multidirectional intermodal corpus constructed through a community effort. The structure of the contribution is as follows: section 1 introduces intermodal corpora, their potential and challenges; section 2 then reviews previous work on variation in translation and evaluates the contribution of the intermodal approach to this research focus; section 3 describes EPTIC, its structure and current stage of development, and section 4 presents a case study focusing on transfer operations leading to collocations in interpreted and translated texts, in two language directions (English>Italian and Italian>English); section 5 concludes by summarizing the contents of the chapter and making suggestions about ways forward in intermodal corpus research.