Development and New Trends in Empirical Translation Studies

In the 1980s, the application of experimental psychology approach to translation process research started a new chapter in the field of Translation Studies (TS).In the 1990s, the interaction between the methodologies from computer technology, cognitive science and neuroscience and translation process research gave a new momentum to the development of empirical translation studies (ETS).Meanwhile, the emergence of Corpus-based Translation Studies (CTS) further extend ETS to the product-and function-oriented researches, which makes TS complete in terms of object of study as an empirical discipline.The methodology for ETS has been preliminarily established.Based on an overview of the development of ETS, the present paper identifies three features which characterize ETS, namely, descriptive research in nature, comprehensive quantitative analysis and transparent methodology.ETS in recent years have shown the following new trends:firstly, the re-examination of the present field and topics available has provided diversified ideas for future research; secondly, the integrations between different research methods have yielded more new research areas; thirdly, increasingly improved computer-assisted technology is making the major objectives of TS, i.e.to describe, to interpret and to predict, turn into reality; fourthly, the triangulation based on data from various sources makes sense-making of data the core of research; lastly, the interdisciplinarity of the field demands the establishment of interdisciplinary research teams.