From its inception in the 1990s, corpus-based translation studies or CBTS represents a growing area of research which is largely based on the development of digital research resources and technologies. This paper offers an overview of the development of the field in the last twenty years, highlighting the importance of developing pragmatic and versatile analytical techniques in order to optimise use of corpus resources and tools based on current natural language processing technologies. This includes the development of small-scale yet effective language corpora and the devise of annotation schemes and strategies to serve specific research purposes that are termed as problem-oriented corpus annotation here.