Abstract: Our research is based upon a survey about papers related to corpus based translation studies from 15 core Chinese linguistic journals (2005 2014), whereby we are able to investigate the status quo of corpus based translation studies. Our research findings are presented as follows. Firstly, although the development of corpus based translation studies have been not so smooth as expected in the past ten years, it still takes on a strong trend of further development. Secondly, corpus based translation studies can be divided into two types, namely, empirical studies accounting for a large proportion and non empirical studies accounting for a small proportion. Thirdly, corpus based translation empirical studies can be conducted at the following nine levels: lexical level, syntactic level, semantic level, textual level, the level of translation universals, the level of translating strategies, the level of language teaching and testing, the level of translated scripts as much as the level of translators. However, the defects of corpus based translation studies are also obvious. Firstly, its research scope is too narrow and its research content is lack of depth. Secondly, its quantitative studies are too simple. Thirdly, it is a pity that corpus driven translation studies have never been undertaken by domestic scholars so far.