Korpusbasierte Translationswissenschaft. Eine Untersuchung am Beispiel des „JRC-Acquis“ Parallelkorpus deutsch-italienisch

The aim of this paper is to describe how translation studies might benefit from the use of text corpora. The first part of the article outlines some basic theoretical questions regarding cooperation between translation studies and corpus linguistic studies. The second part is an investigation dealing with a compilation of legislative texts belonging to the European Union, the JRC-Acquis multilingual parallel corpus, which comprises texts listed in parallel in twentytwo languages. Using a subcorpus of translated texts in the German and Italian languages as an example, this paper provides quantitative data (word-frequency lists and ollocations), while also attempting to explain them by comparing text passages in both the source and target languages. In conclusion, data regarding the frequency of Italian and German modal verbs are generated, showing the different behaviour of modal verbs in translations of legal texts.