María Teresa Sánchez Nieto

Secondary sample corpora in contrastive linguistics and translation studies1

The aim of this paper is to show that conceptualizing and defining those subsets of data that the researcher extracts from an online searchable corpus constitutes a step forward towards more methodological transparency, especially in those settings where researchers do not build their own corpora, but use those that can be searched online. To that end, in Section 2 a succinct typology of online searchable corpora for the study of language-pair related or translation-related phenomena will be drawn. In Section 3, the concept of secondary sample corpus will be put forward, which, in turn, will shed new light on the status of web-based parallel (and parallelized) corpora. Section 4 will be devoted to general methodological requirements and to requirements of the quantitative approach as the main – but not the only – approach shaping the research work in the fields of Corpusbased Descriptive Translation Studies and Corpus-based Contrastive Linguistics; the focus will lie on issues of replicability, comparabil...