Estra: a corpus for the study of the style of translation

Abstract

This article aims at presenting the developments and contributions of corpus-oriented research in Brazil. It first reviews initial work carried out at the Laboratory of Experimentation in Translation (LETRA), at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG). It then shows most of this research has taken a contrastive linguistic approach to translation and gradually evolved to a concern with translational stylistics and the literary translator’s style. The article also reports on the compilation of a corpus for the study of style of translation (ESTRA), designed exclusively for that purpose. It shows how the ongoing corpus work developed with ESTRA enhances interdisciplinarity in TS and introduces triangulation of data obtained through methodological procedures from the different research strands used to approach style. It describes the new methodologies used, especially for tagging the corpus for style categories. The article ends with a critical view on what has been done so far and tries to envisage future perspectives for translational stylistics at LETRA.