A new approach to the analysis of explicitation in translation: Multiple (learner) translation corpora

In the last decade, much research in the field of corpus-based Translation Studies (TS) has set out to investigate the existence of common features of translated texts, i.e. peculiarities which would distinguish them from both their source texts and comparable originals in the same language. Explicitation, among other suggested features, has been extensively studied in this double perspective by means of parallel and monolingual comparable corpora. Such approaches, however, present a number of shortcomings which might be partly overcome by the use of multiple translation corpora, i.e. corpora which contain several translations into the same language for each source text. After a brief review of existing research in the field, the article describes MISTiC, a corpus of multiple student translations in its final stages of construction at the Forlì School for Interpreters and Translators. Details are provided with respect to its development, structure and contents. The article concludes by reporting on preliminary research using this resource, highlighting its potential for TS research.