Triangulating Multilingual Corpora

This chapter offers a succinct overview of triangulation in corpus-based translation studies. It traces the development of triangulation techniques in translation studies and the more recent attempts to combine corpus data and methods. It presents different types of corpus triangulation and offers clear definitions and key principles for each type. The theoretical exploration is complemented with a concise case study that illustrates how corpus triangulation can be applied to multilingual corpora and the type of insights such an application might provide. Corpus triangulation techniques are applied to the examination of adversative connectives in English, Greek, and Russian non-translated and translated tourism texts. The focus is on the communicative preferences for message construction, how clearly clause relationships are communicated in each language, and how any differences observed are negotiated in translation. The chapter concludes with a critical discussion of the significance of triangulation for corpus-based translation studies and its main achievements and shortcomings.