Corpus-based Quality Assessment of Specialist Translation: A Study Using Parallel and Comparable Corpora in English and Italian

Using a bilingual parallel corpus made up of texts dealing with specialist domains in the experimental and social sciences, information technology and humanities as well as a large Italian reference corpus of non-translated texts, the article investigates the extent to which data resulting from basic corpus-processing tools such as word-frequency lists, text statistics and concordances can be related to the assessment of specialist-translation quality. Such a correlation was indeed confirmed by the results, which also confirmed more generally the four translation hypotheses of syntactic explicitation , lexical simplification, levelling out and normalization.