The search for general laws and regularities in Translation Studies gained new momentum in the 1990s when Baker (1993) promoted the use of large electronic corpora as research tools for exploring the linguistic features that render the language of translation different from the language of non-translated texts. By comparing a corpus of translated and non-translated English texts, Baker and her research team put forward the hypothesis that translated texts are characterized by some universal features, namely simplification, explicitation, normalization and levelling-out. The purpose of this...