Qualitative Textual Research

The term qualitative, when applied to research, is polysemous and can often lead to confusion. Many studies associate this term with naturalistic sociological methodologies. In the field of translation studies, these approaches employ tools such as questionnaires and interviews to examine translation phenomena from a human and social perspective. However, in the realm of textual translation studies, "qualitative" should also be understood to encompass any investigation that emphasizes interpretative, semantic, or translation-oriented analysis of textual content. This interpretation would apply to nearly all text-based translation studies, with the exception of those relying on quantitative frequency counts typical of quantitative corpus linguistics, which frequently aims for statistically representative textual sampling.

Qualitative analysis can be conducted on source texts, target texts, or through any contrastive study that evaluates the quality—whether functional or otherwise—of a translation. Texts, in any research design that involves semantic or contextual interpretation, inherently yield qualitative data.

The qualitative study of texts encompasses a wide range of methods, each tailored to specific analytical aims. Diverse theoretical and methodological traditions underpin these approaches, most of which rely fundamentally on coding-based strategies. Although such techniques have a well‑established history within sociology-oriented textual research, their adoption within translation studies has remained comparatively limited. This gap is striking, given that in our discipline the text—across all its manifestations—constitutes the primary object of inquiry.