Reviewed by Taras Shmiher, Ivan Franko National University

This book explores the essential quantitative methods in corpus-based translation studies. It is divided into four sections and accompanied by a preface, a list of contributors, eight appendices, and a subject index.

Part 1 looks at theoretical explorations, focusing on the interplay between qualitative and quantitative methodologies. Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (3–34) applies cognitive linguistic methods and investigates explicit corpus-based data with a more tacit semantic enquiry. Stefan Th. Gries and Stefanie Wulff (35–52) report on how to compute simple binary logistic regressions and linear regressions with an open-source programming language. Analytical frameworks proposed by Meng Ji (53–72) integrate quantitative and qualitative analyses of textual and contextual events and facts of translation.

Part 2 contains more technical detail and case studies. Lidun Hareide and Knut Hofland (75–113) present the compilation process of the Norwegian Spanish Parallel Corpus at the University of Bergen along with some preliminary findings of this research. Michael P. Oakes (115–47) concentrates on descriptive statistics, verifying the use of terms and phenomena like ‘average’ occurrence, ‘bell curve’, vocabulary richness, and collocations. Various clustering techniques as well as methods for document processing, discussed in the article by Shih-Wen Ke (149–74), can reveal information about linguistic similarities from translational corpora.

Part 3 is devoted to the quantitative exploration of literary translation. Investigating the stylistic profiles of the early English translations of Cao Xueqin’s masterpiece Dream of the Red Chamber, Meng Ji and Michael P. Oakes (177–208) incorporate a set of bivariate statistics, commonly used in the comparison of corpora. A comparative stylometric analysis of James Joyce’s ‘Dubliners’ in Turkish translation is the object of study in the article by Jon M. Patton and Fazli Can (209–29). In addition, Jan Rybicki (231–48) contributes to machine-learning stylometric distance methodology by applying Burrow’s delta method to translations and evaluating the empirical results.

Part 4 acquaints the reader with quantitative exploration of translation lexis. In his article, Meng Ji (251–73) presents how the development of a working scientific language impacted the establishment of China’s early modern scientific identity, which also is the result of its increasing engagement with Occidental concepts and idea sets. Alexandre Sotov (275–99) explores tools of corpus linguistics and game theory applied to an aligned parallel corpus of the ancient Indian religious poetry ‘Rigveda’ and its translations in German and Russian, where such techniques as transcription and explicitation are used. Multivariate techniques as factor analysis, principal component analysis, and correspondence analysis are exemplified in the Gard B. Jenset and Barbara McGillivray’s study (301–23) of the productivity and usage of derivational affixes in English-language translations. Gert De Sutter, Isabelle Delaere, and Koen Plevoets (325–45) report on the long-standing issue in translation studies regarding why translated texts differ from the non-translated texts in the same language. The findings show significant differences between the two categories of texts, and how linguistic behavior varies with text type and source language.

This book will contribute to the need for a systematic description of various statistical tests adapted for translation research purposes.