The applicability of description: Empirical research and translation tools

Abstract

The gap between translation research and practice remains a central concern in contemporary Translation Studies (TS). Applied TS is not considered a “pure” branch of the discipline in empirical translation research, and the transition from descriptive findings to empirically- based ready-to-use applications has received little attention. It is the aim of this paper to show how application-oriented results can be obtained by means of descriptive principles used in conjunction with other methodologies such as contrastive analysis and corpus-based studies. Translation performance/training/assessment can benefit from tools derived from applied research of this type.