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With the rapid growth of the Internet and the recent developments in translation technology, the way translators carry out their translation-oriented research has changed dramatically. Resources used by translators to conduct such research have diversified and largely moved from paper to online. However, whilst the number and the variety of online resources available to translators is growing exponentially, little is known about the interactions between translators and these resources. The present research empirically examines the use of online resources by professional translators during their translation-oriented research activities and it does so from an information behaviour perspective. As a first study of its kind, it focusses on freelance professional translators working at their normal place of work. Specifically, this work addresses the questions of the nature and quantity of resources used by translators as well as the time they spend on research activities. Furthermore, it examines the individual differences between the participants during the research activities. These differences are studied by considering the types of resources used and the ways they are accessed, and by investigating the many volume- and time-related aspects of each translator’s research activities. The main contribution of this study lies in the identification of patterns and their systematisation through a multidimensional analysis, culminating in the formulation of two taxonomies - the Resource Type User Taxonomy (RTUT) and Taxonomy of Translator Research Styles (TTRS). It is argued that whilst RTUT may largely depend on technology developments, TTRS reflects the more innate traits of translators’ information behaviour. By employing a two-stage, multi-method approach (Global Survey, N=540 and Main Study N=16), and by conducting it remotely, through the Internet, the present study represents a quasi-naturalistic research design which aims to observe translation processes as they happen in translators’ natural working environments. This methodology in itself constitutes a contribution to translation process studies.

Chinese-English parallel corpora mainly comprise English source texts translated into Chinese, leaving a significant gap for investigating the Chinese-to-English translation direction. This thesis aims to fill this gap by building a parallel corpus named ZHEN, which contains approximately one million characters of contemporary simplified Chinese source texts aligned with authentic translations into English. The first objective of this thesis is to demonstrate the utility of ZHEN in descriptive translation studies by addressing Chinese-to-English translation questions. Three corpus-driven analyses were conducted. The first analysis compared the Chinese subcorpus of ZHEN with a general non-translated simplified Chinese corpus to investigate the types of Chinese texts selected for translation. The second analysis compared the English subcorpus of ZHEN with a non-translated English corpus to examine lexical and discourse differences between English translated from Chinese and non-translated English. The third analysis used parallel concordances to identify Chinese-to-English translation problems. Several significant findings emerged from the study. Firstly, it revealed significant differences between Chinese external and internal communications, influenced by ideology. Secondly, the use of adverbs and modal verbs differed dramatically between the non-translated English corpus and the translated English corpus from Chinese. Lastly, the study demonstrated that investing in parallel concordances and collocations can assist in translating culture-specific goods from Chinese to English. Overall, this thesis addresses the lack of under-resourced Chinese-to-English translation direction by building a parallel corpus and provides insights into the challenges and opportunities of Chinese-to-English translation.

In response to the increasing use of video links in UK courts, this research study examines the challenges court interpreters face when working in court-prison video links at a busy court complex in London, the interpreters' perspectives on these challenges, and the coping strategies they use to overcome them. This is a multi-method study that combined qualitative methods, which consisted of observing and interviewing interpreters and quantitative methods, namely the TEIQue self-report inventory used to assess interpreters' levels of emotional intelligence. Drawing on the psychological concept of Emotional Intelligence (EI), we investigate the influence of court interpreters' EI levels on their views regarding video-mediated interpreting (VMI) and their unique coping strategies in VMI. Our research reaffirms some of the difficulties with VMI that have been established in previous research, and it shows that interpreters in our study adapt their strategies in response to these problematic aspects and that under pressure, they sometimes reluctantly compromise to satisfy competing needs of the remote defendant and the court. A further finding that is consistent with previous research is that interpreters' perspectives on VMI varied. To gain a deeper understanding of these variations, we examined potential relationships between the attitudes towards VMI held by the interpreters in our study and their respective EI profiles. By conducting a cross-analysis of the qualitative data (interviews and observations) and the quantitative data (EI scores), we were able to identify links between interpreters' EI profiles and how they view and respond to VMI challenges. These findings can inform the implementation of video courts in which interpreters are needed, as well as help enhance existing VMI training as part of court interpreters' professional development. They can also be fed into best-practice guidelines for VMI so that VMI can be used more effectively enabling a better experience for all parties involved.