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56 Silvia Bernardini and Federico Zanettin
the core depending on the priorities of each study. This is a welcome feature
since, as we shall suggest below, the consciousness-raising function of corpus
design and building is crucial if one is to avoid gross over-generalisations and
misconceptions in using the corpus.
3.2 Preliminary norms 2: fiction
A second set of observations relates to the more subtle issue of the operation
of preliminary norms in the selection of fiction texts. If the criteria adopted
for selection are only those suggested by Baker (1995, above) and generally
used in monolingual comparable corpus design – i.e. domain, language variety
and time span – the result is hardly a comparable corpus, as the following lists
illustrate:
First 20 fiction titles randomly selected from the Index Translationum database
(from English into Italian)
1. Asimov, The best science fiction of I. Asimov
2. Atwood, The handmaid’s tale
3. Christie, The underdog and other stories
4. Collins, Rock star
5. Dick, The three stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
6. Garfield, The paladin
7. Garrett, Too many magicians
8. Greene, Shades of Greene
9. Heller, Catch 22
10. Jong, Fear of flying
11. Koontz, Strangers
12. Le Carré, The secret pilgrim
13. Le Carré, Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy
14. McCarthy, How I grew
15. Smith, The angels weep
16. Smith, When the lion feeds
17. Stone, Blizzard
18. Strieber & Kunetka, Warday
19. Suyin, The enchantress
20. Van Lustbader, Zero