Converging what and how to find out why: An outlook on empirical translation studies

This chapter conceives of the broad field of empirical translation studies as involving two intersecting planes. The first plane is primarily methodological, and relates to the nature of the empirical data: translation products (texts) and translation processes. This distinction corresponds to two major contemporary strands of empirical translation research that have developed largely independently (corpus-based translation studies and process-based translation studies), but that are gradually undergoing a process of integration. The second plane is primarily conceptual, and relates to the ontological level at which explanations for empirical phenomena are sought. This plane reflects the degree to which cognitive and social factors (or various interplays, integrations or emphases of these) are considered in explanations and theorisations. Empirical translation studies, alongside other areas in linguistics, is taking increasing account of the complex relations not only between different data types, but also between these data types and the complex sociocognitive nature of linguistic processing. In this chapter I explore this ongoing integration in empirical translation studies. I first discuss corpus-based approaches and process-based approaches separately, highlighting the main gains that have been made in each area, as well as how each area has integrated cognitive and social dimensions in its development of explanations. Subsequent to this, I draw out some main areas of integration and overlap between corpus-based and process-based approaches to translation.