Making Way in Corpus-based Intepreting Studies

The idea of editing a volume entirely focused on corpus-based interpreting studies was first discussed following the First Forlì International Workshop on Corpus-based interpreting studies: The State of the Art which was held at the Forlì Campus of the University of Bologna on May 7th and 8th 2015. This event gathered more than 100 scholars from different parts of the world with the aim of sharing their corpus-based research endeavors, ranging from studies that exploited fully machine-readable corpora to small collections of texts or transcripts for manual analysis. This volume serves a dual purpose. On the one hand, it aims at promoting the understanding of the interpretation process and product based not on anecdotal observations or small-size case-studies, but on comparatively large datasets of professional interpretations mostly stored and queried according to standard corpus linguistics methodologies. The volume showcases descriptions of and studies on major interpreting corpora available to date: the EPIC Corpus and its off-springs EPTIC (including also translations) developed at the University of Bologna, EPICG from the University of Ghent (Belgium) and the TIC Corpus from the University of Poznán (Poland); the 2249i Corpus, the DIRSI Corpus and the IMITES Corpus, again from the University of Bologna (Italy); the CorIT Corpus from the University of Trieste (Italy); the FOOTIE Corpus created at UNINT University in Rome (Italy); the NAIST Corpus from the Nara Institute of Science and Technology (Japan) and the CEIPPC Corpus, which was built at the Guangdong University of Foreign Studies (China). On the other hand, the volume is also intended as a renewed call (after Miriam Shlesinger’s first call in 1998) to the research community to further develop the field of corpus-based interpreting studies by offering scholars more corpus-based data and methodologies to compile their own corpora according to their research designs.