Corpus approaches and audiovisual translation

The chapter is devoted to an overview of corpus approaches to audiovisual translation. Both corpus studies and audiovisual translation (AVT) research have grown exponentially in recent years, starting from lukewarm beginnings in the 1960s and 1970s of the twentieth century. Even though the two domains nowadays tend to cross each other’s paths, they are not necessarily connected, as audiovisual translators and analysts do not always avail themselves of corpus-based approaches. In this contribution corpus-based approaches to the translation of audiovisual texts are explored, providing some definitions and detailing their historical development together with their theoretical foundations, that is, the premises on which they rest. The central part of the chapter focuses on the most influential and interesting research on the topic, showing the many advantages (and a few shortcomings) of this approach. In the last part there are some considerations on the implications for teaching translation classes and suggestions on how the approach could be implemented and expanded in the future.