Special Issue: New Findings in Corpus-based Interpreting Studies

Corpus-based Interpreting Research has gained considerable momentum over the last few years. Indeed, an increasing number of scholars have developed corpora using data from different settings or taken advantage of existing ones. After refining the methodology to address the many challenges involved in the corpus-based approach, investigations carried out within this research paradigm are providing insightful observations about the interpreting process and product, including comparisons between different Translation modes. In addition, corpora are now being developed and used as educational resources, thus giving trainee interpreters access to principled sets of materials for targeted practice as well as opportunities to reflect upon the skills they are acquiring. The proposed special issue presents novel investigations that are pushing corpus-based interpreting research to the next level. Some of these are based on or deeply inspired by existing Corpus-based Interpreting Studies (CIS) projects, such as the pioneering European Parliament Interpreting Corpus, while others endeavor to embrace other types of interpreting from more sensitive situations, such as health care and court interpreting. The aim of this special issue is to highlight the results obtained and the efforts being made in a booming research field which as editors we believe it deserves even further support and dissemination. The contributions are organized into two main sections relating to two complementary research areas: interpreting practice and interpreter training. In Section 1 (developing and using corpora to study interpreting) all the papers focus on simultaneous interpreting, with the exception of the first one, which concerns telephone interpreting (Castagnoli/Niemants). Specifically, three papers are based on European Parliament simultaneous interpreting data: one drawing on EPIC (Ghiselli), one looking at a language combination not present in EPIC, i.e. English <> Portuguese (Correia) and one supplementing EPIC with written translations so that it can be analyzed as an intermodal corpus (Morselli). One more contribution is about simultaneous interpreting but it draws on data from various existing corpora (Cresswell). In section 2 (developing and using corpora to train interpreters), one more study looks at intermodality with data (partly) from the EP but with an educational target in mind (Bertozzi). The last paper in this section shows how leveraging on corpora it is possible to build additional resources to improve court interpreting (Orozco).