This edited collection has been inspired by the need to shed light on the development of, and the current trends in, corpus-based translation and interpreting studies in the Chinese context. It has been almost 40 years since the first English corpus in China was compiled. The Jiaotong Daxue English for Science and Technology (JDEST) Corpus was devel oped in 1982 by the Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and it contained one million words sampled from texts written in British and American English; this was later expanded to four million words. Various types of corpora have been built since then, both by individual scholars and by institutions. For instance, the Centre for Chinese Linguistics (CCL) Diachronic Chinese Corpus, compiled by Beijing University, is the larg est existing diachronic Chinese corpus in mainland China. The Beijing Language and Culture University (BLCU) Chinese Corpus (BCC),1 developed by the BLCU in 2015, is a monolingual corpus of contempo rary Chinese that covers the period from 1945 to 2015, allowing schol ars to carry out a diachronic analysis. A number of translational corpora have also been built, encouraging scholars to identify any patterns or specific features of Chinese trans lations, although most are English–Chinese parallel corpora. Examples include the Diachronic Chinese–English Parallel Corpus, compiled by Beijing Foreign Studies University and Qufu Normal University in China. Some corpora feature a specific genre and Shanghai Jiao Tong University has become the spearhead in this regard, as evidenced by the English–Chinese Conference Interpreting Parallel Corpus, the English Chinese Parallel Corpus of Shakespeare’s Dramas, the Chinese–English Parallel Corpus of Contemporary Chinese Fictions, and the Chinese English and English–Chinese News Parallel Corpus, all of which were compiled by the research team at School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Apparently, corpus-based research has also been expanding its hori zons from linguistic research to translation studies in China. Much corpus-based work on translation and interpreting has been carried out. A good number of books in this area of study have also been published, including the book series on corpus-based translation studies published by Shanghai Jiao Tong University Press. Although an increasing num ber of English articles on corpus-based translation and interpreting have been published by Chinese scholars, Chinese scholarship in this particu lar area remains largely unknown to English-speaking academia since they are mostly written in Chinese.
