Conclusion

When the strenuous but intellectually satisfying journey of writing this book is about to end, we suddenly realized that nothing is a coincidence. This book is in fact the natural result of our academic training, T&I teaching and practice for the last 20–30 years. Our training in empirical studies and TS has naturally led us to the solution of problems that had puzzled us. For example, in the early 2010s, when we found that the field of TS was rather blurred and the reviews of TS were subjective, outdated or not sophisticated enough, as empirical researchers, we naturally adopted the relatively new corpus-based data-driven or bibliometric approach by collecting, categorizing and analyzing all the relevant journal articles in the new millennium. With the help of the “map” produced through the reviews based on TIEJAD (the Translation and Interpretation English Journal Article Database), we were able to steer ourselves to finding a way to address problems arising from T&I classes. Our training in applied linguistics equipped us with the necessary statistical and qualitative tools for investigation. It seems that through the entire process of our research we have the right tools when we need them.