Corpus-based Interpreting Studies in China: Overview and Prospects

For a long time in its history, interpreting studies has focused on the cognitive process in interpreting, which is typical of “decontextualized” experimental methods and small-scale of research data. The emergence of Corpus-based Interpreting Studies (CIS) in recent years has helped to strengthen the ecological validity and significance of interpreting studies. The inception of CIS in China in 2009 (Hu and Tao 2009; Zhang 2009; Wang and Ye 2009) occurred as a natural result of the fast-growing fields of corpus linguistics and corpus-based translation studies in the region (Hu and Tao 2012). In spite of the special difficulty in data collection, transcription and annotation, CIS, ‘as an alternative and complement to intuition, surveys or laboratory experiments’ (Setton 2012), has shown great potential in describing the features of the interpreting product and in revealing complexities of the interpreting process with large-scale authentic data. This chapter reviews the development of CIS in China based on the statistics of interpreting corpora developed in the region and journal articles and published books (or book chapters) published in the region. It summarises the techniques used in corpus construction in several representative corpora such as the CECIC (Hu and Tao 2009; Hu 2010, 2012, 2013) and CEIPPC (Wang 2009, 2012, 2013). It presents an overview of the research topics explored including features of ‘interpretese’, strategies and norms of interpreting, cognitive processing in the interpreting process and utilisation of interpreting corpora in interpreting training. It also discusses the issues to be addressed further in CIS, including: (1) How can the analytic tools of corpus linguistics and corpus-based translation studies be better adapted to the peculiarities and complexities of interpreting studies? (2) How can CIS go beyond the description of data and provide explanation about phenomena in interpreting? (3) How can CIS contribute to the conceptualisation of theories?