Corpora have revolutionized nearly all areas of linguistic research over the past four decades (McEnery, Xiao and Tono 2006; McEnery and Hardie 2012). Translation studies and contrastive linguistics are no exceptions. Indeed, the rapid development of bilingual parallel corpora as well as monolingual and multilingual comparable corpora since the early 1990s has been of particular relevance and crucial importance to translation studies and contrastive linguistics. This special issue of Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory focuses on corpus-based translation and contrastive linguistic studies involving two genetically different languages, namely English and Chinese, which we believe have formed an important interface with its unique features as a result of the mutual interaction between the two languages. This introduction will first contextualize the special issue by exploring the state of the art in using corpora in translation and contrastive linguistic studies, particularly in the context of the two languages covered, and then provide a synopsis of each article included in this volume and comment on its significance and implications for linguistic theorization.