Introduction: The ascent of corpus-based translation studies

Shuangzi Pang
and 
Kefei Wang
’s contribution offers an insightful overview of 
the evolution of this expanding interdisciplinary area of research over the last two 
decades, assesses the state of the art, and points to future directions. Interestingly, the 

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authors identify three major trends that have emerged in the field. Firstly, translations are 
being viewed as contact varieties that are influenced by a range of constraining factors. 
Secondly, the field has diversified its research perspectives going beyond linguistics, thus 
reconciling translation and cultural studies. Finally, there is a growing interest in creating 
multilingual and diachronic composite corpora and conducting multivariate statistical 
analyses. 
Ho Ling Kwok
, 
Sara Laviosa
and 
Kanglong Liu
’s paper, “Lexical simplification 
in learner translation: A corpus-based approach,” is in line with the emerging trend of 
viewing translated texts, including trainees’ translations, as forms of constrained 
communication. Their study is based on two comparable corpora: the 
International 
Corpus of English in Hong Kong
(ICE-HK; Nelson 2006) and the 
Parallel Learner 
Translation Corpus 
(PLTC)
1
compiled at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. The 
aim of the study is to test the lexical simplification hypothesis in translations by students. 
The findings show that Chinese-to-English translations are not lexically simpler than 
writing in English as a Second Language (ESL), as indicated by the four parameters of: 
1) lexical density (which indicates informativeness), 2) standardized type-token ratio, 3) 
core vocabulary coverage, and 4) list head coverage (which indicates lexical diversity). 
Moreover, student translations are found to be lexically denser than ESL writing. The 
authors discuss the motivations for these results from the perspective of constrained 
communication, the language background of writers and translators, source language 
influence, and comparable corpus construction. 
Still within the field of descriptive corpus studies of translation,