Corpus Methods in Legal Translation Studies

The present chapter provides an overview of some corpus methods adopted in Legal Translation Studies (LTS). In fact, corpora have become a crucial tool to study legal language and translation as well as a mainstream methodology (Biel 2010). The potential of corpus linguistics for researching legal language and translation (Biel 2010, Goźdź-Roszkowski 2011), and as a tool in translator training (Monzó Nebot 2008, Biel 2010) is unquestionable. Whether conceived as a methodology or as a discipline – the controversy has not been ironed out yet (see Tognini-Bonelli 2001, p. 1-2, McEnery et al. 2006, p. 7-8; McEnery & Hardie 2012, p. 147-152) – the introduction of electronic corpora represents a watershed in LTS and is still bearing fruits. This chapter discusses the usefulness of legal corpora (Pontrandolfo 2012; Marín Pérez & Rea Rizzo 2012; Vogel et al. 2017; Biel 2018a) for LTS by presenting some research conducted with the use of different but complementary methods. The studies mentioned in the chapter are analysed through the lens of methodological dichotomies (i.e. local vs. global, quantity vs. quality, corpus-based vs. corpus-driven, monolingual vs. multilingual, comparable vs. parallel, translated vs. non-translated), which demonstrates the importance of eclecticism in the selection of corpus methods in LTS.