Descriptive translation studies and the use of corpora: investigating mediation universals

This article describes the empirical investigation of mediated language by means of a descriptive, evidence-based approach, through the use of monolingual comparable parallel corpora. Mediated texts of various types are compared from the point of view of their common phraseology, and are contrasted with non-mediated texts. Starting from the premise that mediation is an intrinsic feature of most forms of communication, we compiled four sub- corpora illustrating various types of mediation in both written and oral, monolingual and bilingual discourse, namely, Europarliamentary debates, Annual Company Reports, American movies and specialized European Commission texts written by non-native speakers and edited by native speakers. Drawing particularly on the European Commission texts, we report that language used by non-native speakers and edited language has features in common with translated text.