Foreword

The Preface introduces the objective and plan of this volume which 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.