From Corpus-Based Interpreting Studies to Interpreting Data ‘Mining’: Trials and Perspectives

Interpreting is an activity that has existed since ancient times and occurs in different aspects of everyday life. There is a large amount of interpreting-related data that is worthy of scientific exploration. Nevertheless, systematic collection and analysis of such data were hardly explored until the advent of corpus-based interpreting studies. This paper starts with a discussion of different types of data in interpreting studies. It then provides a review of corpus-based interpreting studies, and suggests that data mining may help to bring further advancement to the subdiscipline. The paper will introduce several corpora projects that the author has been engaged in to illustrate the potential prospects for interpreting data ‘mining’. Through these examples, the paper shows the benefits and challenges of dealing with large-size interpreting corpora. The paper also illustrates the possible ways to build synergies with digital humanities and data science, which will help to further advance the subdiscipline of corpus-based interpreting studies and serve a fruitful future direction.