Corpus linguistics and translation tools for digital humanities: An introduction

Studies in the Humanities make use of sophisticated IT resources, which in the last decades have shown a rapid development and an ever-increasing interest on the part of scholars, as testified not only by the growing numbers of publications and scientific periodicals devoted to the methodology behind various form of digital investigation, but also by the rise of master's and doctoral courses in the digital humanities. However, any attempt to describe what is meant by digital humanities has not been discrete and clear-cut: as a matter of fact, a ‘digital humanities approach’ cannot be reduced to the exploitation of computer resources in linguistics investigations. Indeed, the field of the digital humanities is at the same time a field of investigation, a domain of practice, and a set of methodologies. This volume tries to offer a new and clearer perspective of the way in which any investigation in the digital humanities should be carried out and is meant as a resource for researchers, in particular, who wish to investigate digital humanities as both a domain of practice and as a set of methodological approaches to be applied to the domains of Corpus Linguistics and Translation. Since a digital humanities approach to CL and to translation studies cannot be reduced to the simple digitalization of texts then collected in parallel corpora, and since both realms of investigation make use of software, such as, for example, CL tools, speech recognition software, translation memories, parallel corpora, etc., the chapters in this volume will offer a novel and original framework to triangulate research so as to pursue both scientific and educational goals within the digital humanities.