Corpus-based Translation Activities for Language Learners

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Corpus-based Translation Activities forLanguage LearnersFederico Zanettina

a Università di Perugia, ItalyPublished online: 10 Feb 2014.

To cite this article: Federico Zanettin (2009) Corpus-based Translation Activitiesfor Language Learners, The Interpreter and Translator Trainer, 3:2, 209-224, DOI:10.1080/1750399X.2009.10798789

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The Interpreter and Translator Trainer 3(2), 2009, 209-24

ISSN: 1750-399X © St. Jerome Publishing, Manchester

Corpus-based Translation Activities for Language Learners

FEDERICO ZANETTINUniversità di Perugia, Italy

Abstract. While a number of studies have dealt with the use of corpus linguistics resources in the education of translation train-ees, and a large body of literature exists on the use of corpora for second language learning activities, the relevance of corpus-based translation activities in second language learning settings has been explored to a lesser extent. This paper argues that transla-tion can be a legitimate type of activity for ESL learners and that integrating corpus resources into second-language writing and translating means supplementing the traditional learning grammar of “dictionary items + combinatory rules” with a novel learning grammar of “corpora + rules for querying and analyz-ing them”. Examples are presented from a course in English as a foreign language delivered to Italian postgraduate students of international relations. Students were asked to revise an MT translation of a short text from an academic or journalistic source related to international relations, and then write an essay explain-ing how they used corpora and corpus linguistics techniques to evaluate and revise the translation. Students’ performance varied both in terms of the final translation produced and in the way and degree to which they used corpus resources, and it appears that the students who mostly benefited from the course were those who were able to both formulate better hypotheses and linguistic queries, and to analyze the results of different corpus resources. While the course was aimed at language rather than translation learners, the results also have clear implications for the latter.

Keywords: Data-driven learning, Translation and language teaching, L2 translation, Corpus-based activities, Pedagogical uses of MT, John Sinclair, Italian-English translation.

This article begins by providing the general background to the study presented, addressing the issue of translation in L2 teaching and learning, outlining why translation has been looked down upon in this area, and why the author thinks it does not deserve to be. I then give particular consideration to the

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210 Corpus-based Translation Activities for Language Learners

role of translation into the second language. After explaining the rationale and the motivations for using translation activities in foreign language teaching, I describe the context in which I have been using such activities, i.e. a course in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) in a faculty of Political Science in Italy, and present some examples from the students’ translation projects. I then discuss the role in these activities of corpora on the one hand and the teacher on the other. Finally, I offer some generalizations regarding what I see as the main advantages and the main risks of corpus-based translation activities in this pedagogical setting.

1. Translation and language learning

Translation has not had very good press in language teaching and learning for most of the past century. The long tradition of translation as a learn-ing method first became unfashionable, to say the least, with the Reform Movement at the turn of the 20th century, and then with the advent of the communicative paradigm in language teaching, in part as a reaction to the grammar-translation method in which students were asked to translate de-contextualized sentences with a focus on linguistic structures rather than on communication. A number of reasons were usually given in order to shun translation as a classroom activity (see Malmkjaer 1998b:6 for a summary of these), for instance that translation represents a distinctive skill, independ-ent of and radically different from the four skills which define language competence (i.e. reading, writing, speaking, and listening). Translation was also described as an unrealistic activity, something that language learners would never do outside of the class. Perhaps the main reason why transla-tion was banned from the foreign language classroom, if only in principle, is that most approaches to FL teaching recommended that all communication should be carried out exclusively in the foreign language. The use of the first language in the classroom was described as counterproductive, as it would favour interference from the L1 and prevent students thinking and expressing themselves in the L2. For instance, the UK national curriculum for modern languages states that “The natural use of the target language for virtually all communication is a sure sign of a good modern language course” (Depart-ment of Education, 1990:58, quoted in Cook 1999:201). Because of this, it was argued that translation could be regarded as an appropriate activity only in translator training settings.

As Carreres (2006:5) points out, however, translation can be seen as “a victim of the grammar-translation method, rather than the source of its evils”. It can be contended that the problem was not translation per se, but rather the way in which translation was used, which abstracted language from its communicative function. According to Malmkjaer (1998b:8), translation is indeed a communicative activity which “far from being independent of the

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Federico Zanettin 211

other four skills… [is] dependent on and inclusive of them”, and as Cook (1999) suggests, there is no reason why the use of activities which involve the first language, such as translation, should be restricted in the L2 learning environment, at least in those classes where the students share a common L1. Furthermore, Cook (1999:202) argues, the L1 is always present in the mind of learners:

Every activity the student carries out visibly in the L2 also involves the invisible L1. The apparent L2 nature of the classroom covers up the presence of the L1 in the minds of the students. From a multicom-petence perspective, all teaching activities are cross-lingual ... the difference among activities is whether the L1 is visible or invisible, not whether it is present or altogether absent.

In any case, notwithstanding theoretical oppositions, translation – and more generally the use of the first language – has not been discarded in foreign language teaching settings (Carreres 2006:2, Cook 1999:201). Translation has in fact continued to be rather widespread both informally as a means to orally convey meaning and formally in the guise of classroom activities or for testing purposes (Newson 1998, Klein-Braley and Franklin 1998). Since the 1980s the status and role of translation in the FL classroom have been reassessed (Titford 1983, Titford and Hieke 1985, Duff 1987, Atkinson 1987) in part – perhaps not surprisingly – coincidentally with the rise and success of Translation Studies as an academic discipline. So, for example, it has been stressed that translation plays an important role in lexical acquisition, for instance by focusing on shared cognates, false friends, collocations and idioms (Partington 1998, Lima 2005). Ultimately, like any other process of discourse construction, translation is a meaning creation activity, the difference being that translation is “guided creation of meaning” (Halliday 1992:15, italics in the original).

The suggestion that translation should be appropriate only in translator training contexts rests on the premise that learning to translate and learning to communicate in a foreign language are two radically different activities. There are certainly some differences between the teaching of translation as an end in itself and its role as a means of learning a language. Factors such as the context and the ‘real-world’ purpose of the text, the target readership and the translation commissioner may certainly be seen as less crucial in language learning than in translation training proper. However, as Carreres (2006:18) argues, this distinction has often been overemphasized and she suggests that translators should be seen as life-long language learners and language learners as natural translators. While most students learning a foreign language are usually not expected to become professional translators, there is no reason to rule out the possibility that they may have to translate in their professional lives. A case in point is in fact that of most European students in the social

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sciences, who in their professional career may well have to translate, both in and out of their L1 in and out of English, the international language of higher education. To such students translation activities may be a means to learn the foreign language but also to learn about content which is often available only in English. Translation activities may offer them the opportunity to improve their awareness of text type, style, register and knowledge of vocabulary in their curricular fields, e.g. legal, economic and historical fields for students of international relations.

2. Translation into the L2

The idea that one should translate only into one’s own native language is often regarded as conventional wisdom both in professional and lay environments. However, that translators translate only into their L1 is more of a myth or an ideal than a reality. Courses in translation into L2 are standard practice in many translator training institutions, a substantial number of textbooks have been published in the area, and professional translators and interpreters do translate into their second (or third) language. The illegitimacy of L2 direc-tionality in translation pedagogy, sometimes tellingly called – especially by those who oppose it – “marked”, “inverse” or “reverse” translation, is being challenged by a growing body of literature (Campbell 1998, Stewart 1999, 2000, 2008, Grosman et al. 2000, Kelly et al. 2003, Pokorn 2005, Pavlović 2007, Kearns 2007) which raises issues concerning quality and directional-ity, and confronts a range of educational and professional realities related to translation practices.

As regards language pedagogy, scepticism expressed about the use of translation has been even more severe in the case of translation into the L2. While it is conceded that graduates might at times translate into their native language in their professional lives, translation out of the native language is often described not only as “unrealistic” but as “thoroughly useless” (Carreres 2006:2). Interestingly though, foreign language students often do not seem to share this conviction (Sewell 2004, Liao 2006, Carreres 2006). Students who responded to a questionnaire at the University of Cambridge, for instance, not only thought that translation is useful as a language learn-ing method, but also unambiguously perceived that translation into the L2 is “conducive to language learning” (Carreres 2006:9), even more so than translation into the L1.

Hand-in-hand with a belief in the uselessness of translation into the L2 goes the belief that, if translation into the L2 has to be taught, the teacher should be a native speaker of the target language, in as much as only native speakers can provide appropriate feedback as to ‘correct, natural sounding’ use. This issue of the pedagogical virtues of native speakers and of the role of foreign language instructors will be taken up in section 3.4. It will suffice

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to note here that, again, regardless of what one may think, this supposed necessity is more an ideal than a reality, since many foreign language teach-ers are not native speakers of the language they teach.

3. Pedagogical translation teaching into the L2 using corpus resources

In what follows I suggest that translation into the L2 may usefully help students improve their reading and writing skills in a specialized subject in a foreign language, in this case English, and draw examples from translation activities carried out by students taking an English as a foreign language course at the University of Perugia. More specifically, I argue that corpus-based translation activities can increase the learning autonomy of the students and that the use of corpus resources affects the role of the teacher in such a context.1

3.1 Course description

The students whose work is referred to in this section are studying towards a postgraduate degree in International Relations in Italy. While as a rule foreign languages or translation are not the highest of their priorities, they usually understand that they will need English in their professional lives. The level of language proficiency among the students is on average intermediate, as defined by the B1 indicator of the Common European Framework of Refer-ence for Languages. Some students are above and some are below that level, and their native language is mostly Italian. In the year referred to in the cur-rent study, the course (about 60 contact hours) was attended by between 60 and 70 students, and comprised lectures, discussions and hands-on classes in the language lab, partly involving teacher-directed activities and tasks, and partly small group or individual tutorial work as prompted by the students working on their projects. The free e-learning platform Moodle was used to facilitate interaction both with the teacher and among the students.2

The core component of the course involves the completion and assess-ment of a translation project based on the revision of the output of an online machine translation system like Google Translate or Yahoo! Babel Fish. Students were asked first to select a text in Italian, usually a book chapter or journal article belonging to a specific disciplinary subject field among those in the curriculum, i.e. law, economics or history. A short extract of their chosen text (about 400 words) was then fed to a MT system of their

1 On the use of corpus-based translation activities see also Bowker (1998), who, how-ever, uses a corpus of target texts with translation trainees working into their native language.2 On the use of Moodle as a virtual learning environment, see e.g. Seghiri et al. (2007).

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choice which produced an English target text. The students had to revise this preliminary target version and come up with a final version using a variety of tools in the process.

The use of machine-assisted translation systems as aids in language teaching is of course not new (Somers 2003, Niño 2004, Gaspari 2007:35-39), and the widespread availability of free online MT services makes them a real-world tool among others available to language learners as well as to anyone else interested in communication across languages. While some have suggested that by looking at the MT output students may be exposed to a ‘bad language’ model, others have stressed that the comparison of source and target texts may enhance language learners’ perception of contrastive differ-ences between languages, and help them learn aspects of second-language grammar and syntax. The method described can be equally useful without any L1 texts: the students’ revision work could just as easily start with texts produced directly in English, for example by the students themselves. In fact, the students who participated in the current study were encouraged to use the same methodology to revise their own commentaries on the translation revision process. However, students seem to be less intimidated by, and more critical of, output from MT systems than their own provisional drafts.

The core of the translation project consisted in the revision of the MT output using a variety of resources and tools, ranging from standard references such as bilingual dictionaries to corpora and corpus tools. These included the use of the Web as a corpus, and other available corpus resources, such as the 100 million-word British National Corpus (BNC), the 385 million-word Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), a 17 million-word corpus of newspapers texts, a 100 million-word corpus of Internet texts at Leeds University, a 27 million-word parallel and aligned corpus consisting of Italian and English transcriptions of the EU parliamentary proceedings, and others. The students were instructed on how to use Google’s advanced search features in order to use the WWW as a language rather than content resource (Hubbard 2005). They used either the software that was bundled with a par-ticular corpus or general corpus analysis software such as Wordsmith Tools or TextStat (for monolingual corpora) and Paraconc (for the parallel corpus), to analyze the various corpora. Finally the students were asked to submit the revised translation together with a commentary in which they justified their choices and discussed advantages and shortcomings of using corpora and corpus tools during the revision process. The evaluation of the project took into account both the quality of the final translated version in terms of accuracy and the revision process as described in the commentary.3

3 Part of the final mark was also determined by a component of the course which focused on oral expression.

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3.2 Corpora for translation activities

The following example shows (a) one sample sentence from an Italian textbook on the history of the United States, followed by (b) the translation generated by an online machine translation system and (c) a manual revision of that translation.

a) I puritani della Nuova Inghilterra furono i primi fra tutti i coloni inglesi d’America ad elaborare in modo sistematico una teoria originale dello Stato e della società.

b) The puritani of New England were the first between all coloni English of America to elaborate in systematic way a theory originate them of the State and the society.

c) New England Puritans were the first among English colonists of America to elaborate systematically an original theory of State and society.

In the MT output for this sentence some Italian words are left untrans-lated (puritani and coloni, underlined in the text). In other cases some words were simply left out. The English sentence produced by the MT system also contains an obvious mistake, seemingly originating in a wrong parsing of the source text: originale has been interpreted as a verb form plus direct object plural pronoun, ‘origina + le’, rather than as an adjective. While these obvious shortcomings were immediately spotted and the translation was provision-ally amended (‘puritans’, ‘colonists/pioneers’, ‘an original theory’), the final translation was arrived at after discussing every possible alternative which came to the mind of the students. By browsing the various corpora and the web students considered various alternatives, finally settling on a common version. For example, a web search showed that “New England Puritans” was preferable in terms of overall frequency to “The New England Puritans”, and “(The) Puritans of New England”, as well as to “(The) New England’s Puritans” which was hardly attested. A search for in modo sistematico in the parallel corpus suggested that “systematically” is largely preferable to “in a systematic way”, and so on.

Students worked on the hypothesis that they had reasons to doubt the ac-ceptability of the MT output. They were usually prompted by English words or expressions they did not know or that they perceived as too literal render-ings of the source text, and they looked for better alternatives. As one student put it, “in some cases, it was just a matter of verifying the accuracy of the MT output, whereas in others there were good reasons to improve the overall quality of the text.” They often started by looking up words in a bilingual dictionary, then they used the web and/or one or more corpora (monolingual and bilingual) to compare the use and frequency of different translation candidates. First they checked whether something actually “existed”, and if

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so, how frequent it was compared to alternative choices. When they raised a question, they were at times proved right (i.e. the MT output was wrong) and at times wrong (i.e. the MT output was right). In both cases, they learned something new. Clearly, in order to do so they had to ask the right question and properly formulate queries and analyze the results. A few examples to illustrate how the students proceeded are provided below:

One student was not convinced that ‘globalization’ can ‘exercise an effect’ on something (on income redistribution in this case), which was the rather literal translation proposed by the MT system. So he googled this phrase and found no results. Then he searched for the phrase “an effect” both in the BNC and in a newspaper corpus and from the resulting concordance lines found that something can “have” or “produce” an effect on something else. On the basis of quantitative results he then opted for “globalization has (a number of) effects on income redistribution.” The same student was also not convinced that the phrase ‘the central theme of the debate’ might work in English, feeling again that this was a too literal rendition of the Italian source phrase. In this case, however, he found that the expression is indeed widely attested on the Internet, with many results coming from academic or media sources. He also looked up the expression in the European Parliamentary Proceedings parallel corpus and saw that it is indeed used to a significant extent to correspond with the original Italian expression in question.

The rather amusing translation “(economic) processes Corsican” pro-posed by the MT system for “processi (economici) in corso” was eventually rendered by one student as ‘ongoing processes’, after consulting the very large online Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) at Brigham Young University and discovering that these two words frequently collocate with each other. The student also checked a number of texts which were the sources of his concordance lines and saw that this expression is often used in academic and institutional texts which were comparable to the one he was translating. In another case, the MT system proposed “the spread of new technologies” as a translation for “la diffusione di nuove tecnologie”. While a Google search revealed that this expression is actually attested, the student was not convinced and went on to see whether the English cognate for the Italian word diffusione might prove to be a suitable alternative in the context of his translation. So he searched for both “spread” and “diffusion” and found that the first noun is much more common. However, he was not satisfied and searched for a longer context, looking for both “the spread of * technologies” and “the diffusion of * technologies” (where the asterisk represents one or more intervening words) using Google and searching the Corpus of Contemporary American English. He found that both phrases are present both on the WWW and in the COCA. By analyzing the data in closer detail, he came to the conclusion that while ‘spread’ as a head noun is perhaps more common than ‘diffusion’ in general English (about half of

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the results in COCA came from newspapers and magazines), ‘diffusion’ is used almost exclusively in learned texts (the vast majority of the results came from academic texts). So he eventually opted for ‘the diffusion of new technologies’.

One last example comes from the translation project of a student working with a text about the American electoral system. The MT output for “avere i requisiti per votare” was “have the requirements to vote”. Having doubts about this translation, the student first consulted a bilingual dictionary, which offered a range of alternatives, such as ‘fulfil/satisfy/comply with/suit/match the requirements’. However, a search in different corpora, both monolingual and bilingual, convinced her that ‘meet’ is by far the most typical verb col-locating with ‘requirements’, and she even found a number of examples from authoritative sources (official government web sites) which perfectly matched the extended context of her translation.

Far from being optimal translations, the revised texts produced by the students also evidenced a number of problems: some students simply did not ask the right questions, or overlooked wrong translations proposed by the MT system. Generally speaking, less proficient students did not spot as many potential problems as more advanced students. Also, when analyzing corpus results some students did not pay attention to repeated patterns of occurrence or to the contexts in which a word or phrase appeared. Instead, they used frequency as a paramount criterion. For instance, having to decide whether to use the verb ‘develop’ or ‘evolve’ one student wrote “I chose evolved rather than developed because it is much more frequent in the WWW/Google”, completely disregarding the contextual meaning of both forms, or for that matter the meaning of the text to be translated.

The outcomes of the translation projects were thus very dissimilar, ranging from the very good to the very bad, but it should be noted that this correlates with the varied initial competence, motivation and interest for language learning of this type of student (Brodine 2001). On a more positive note, it should be said that at least some students found this type of activity and the use of corpora, totally unknown to them before, quite stimulating. These students showed much appreciation and they actually did improve their lin-guistic competence, to the extent that native speakers interviewed could not recognize foreign or disturbing elements in the translations produced by some of the most proficient students.

3.3 Role of corpora

‘Pedagogical’ (as opposed to ‘vocational’) translation into the L2 (‘prose’ translation) was traditionally conceived as an exercise in L2 grammar. A corpus-driven approach aims instead at supplementing the traditional learning grammar of “dictionary items + combinatory rules” with a novel learning grammar of “corpora + rules for querying and analyzing them”. One of the

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main advantages of working with corpora and concordancing tools, as well as of using the web and search engines, is that users can focus on language units longer than the single word. Reliance on corpus data for the description of language has shown that an abstract language system does not correspond to the reality of actual texts. There is not a single overarching grammar which combines lexical items through transformational rules, but multiple local grammars which “mainstream”, i.e. orient standard usage of textual units longer than the typographical word (or n-grams, as more technologi-cally oriented people would have it). Just like single dictionary entries, each 2-word combination has its own grammar, and so have longer phrases. Each successive increase of textual length increases the complexity and variability of combinatorial patterns, up to the full intertextuality of quotations.

By using corpora and corpus analysis tools L2 learners often work with unanalyzed knowledge and retrieve extended segments of language independ-ently of any awareness of grammatical or syntactic categories. In this sense corpus use in language teaching leans closer to acquisition than to learning. This is not to say that explicit linguistic knowledge is not useful, since by using grammatical generalizations learners are better able to analyze corpus data. However, even less sophisticated learners may manage to produce their own generalizations based on their use of corpora. For instance, by looking up the phrase “is not a duty” in various corpora a student became aware that the verbal form preceding it is usually a gerund rather than an infinitive, and her preference for “voting is not a duty” over “to vote is not a duty” was confirmed by a Google search for this longer phrase. Prompted by the source text in their native language and which they have to translate, students explore and discover that texts are not just a sum of lexical items but that they can be seen as the result of longer stretches of words molding together.

Just in passing and without delving into the controversial issue of whether the Web is, can, or should be considered a corpus I would like to suggest that well constructed corpora and the multifarious anarchy of the Web can be seen as complementary. While corpora such as the BNC and the COCA are certainly more reliable than the Web as concerns core patterns of lan-guage use, the sheer volume of the Web means that this source can cover the whole spectrum of possibilities: at one end no corpus can rival the lexical and terminological richness of the Web; at the other end only in the Web can very long stretches of discourse be found. As an example of this, I will briefly present a very simple experiment which I conducted starting from the well known Sinclairian exemplification of the phraseology of “naked eye”. As Sinclair (1996, 2003) explains, the two-word combination “naked eye” occurs in restricted contexts and is typically preceded by the prepositional phrase “to/with the”, in turn preceded by a range of words related to sight and an indication of something that is too small to be seen.

A Google search for “to the naked eye” produced some 2.5 million hits

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(as opposed to 884 in the BNC). The most common left collocate within the first ten hits was “visible”, with 3 instances. This is also the most com-mon collocate in the BNC. A Google search for “visible to the naked eye” produced approximately 1.2 million hits (as opposed to 18 in the BNC). By enlarging the search phrase to include the most common left collocate in the first screen of Google results (i.e. ten hits), we get “barely visible to the naked eye” (82,000 hits, none in the BNC), then “be barely visible to the naked eye” (49,000 hits). The longest context reached by a Google search using this method goes up to “grains that are so small as to be barely visible to the naked eye”, with 2 instances. It seems highly unlikely that such a long stretch of text (14 words) can be repeated (unless in a duplicate document) anywhere but on the web.

3.4 Role of students and teacher

The use of corpora also redefines the respective roles of students and teach-ers. In a “data-driven learning” perspective (Johns 1991) learners become language researchers and take on an active role discovering language by themselves from authentic examples. Corpora in a language learning context are particularly suitable to serendipity or discovery learning activities whereas the corpus is not necessarily “expected to provide the right answers … but constantly presents new challenges and stimulates new questions, renewing the user’s curiosity and offering ample opportunity for researching aspects of language and culture” (Bernardini 2002:166). Unlike in traditional trans-lation activities, which are usually teacher-centered and where students are supposed to learn by being exposed to the expert knowledge of the teacher, in this learning context the teacher acts more as a guide and a facilitator, “suggesting alternative ways to proceed, other interpretations of the data or possible ways forward” (ibid.). This seems especially relevant in teaching settings in which, as in the case reported, the teacher is not a native speaker of the target language. Non-native teachers may be thought “to lack sufficient foreign language expertise to be able to assess with absolute confidence the inevitably wide range of target language solutions that students come up with” (Stewart 2008:online). However, if the teacher works with the same direction as his/her students (i.e. into the foreign rather than into the native language) he or she may be better able “to grasp all the subtle distinctions and nuances that the source text has to offer” (ibid.) and to appreciate the extent of the difficulties encountered by the students in their attempts to discard what is unsuitable and select what is suitable when encoding their foreign target language, thus being in a better position when it comes to evaluating the learning process.

A non-native may be better suited than a native foreign language instructor in the context of language pedagogy, in which the emphasis is on the process

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of learning how to produce acceptable texts in one’s L2 rather than on the accuracy of the translation products. In non-vocational settings the goal of the translation is not to produce a native-like text, but a text that functions in a foreign communicative situation which graduate students may encounter in their professional lives. Furthermore, in an international context where non-native speakers of English outnumber native speakers (Dewey 2007) and where English functions as a lingua franca, the ‘native-speaker variety’ of English does not enjoy anymore the prestige otherwise conferred on it because of its ‘authenticity’ (Kramsch 1998:79-82). In this respect, ‘authentic-ity’ and ‘authoritativeness’ become properties of the corpus data rather than of the language instructor.4

4. Conclusions

Summing up, it seems that language learners may benefit from using corpus tools and resources for translation activities in the second language classroom. Students learn by reading and writing material related to their respective areas of interest, and they are engaged in a real communicative task, such as writing an English translation of a text in their native language. Learners can heighten their awareness of contrastive aspects and of varieties of possible translations, even if equipped with limited formal linguistic knowledge, if they are given the opportunity to discover language rules and conventions by themselves. The use of corpus resources in a translation task fosters reading and writing skills and encourages self-confidence and autonomy, and teachers do not necessarily have to be target language native speakers, but rather experts in using resources, formulating queries, evaluating find-ings. Other learning contexts, including translator training contexts, may also benefit from such activities. On the other hand, the use of corpus tools and methodologies involves also a number of risks. Insufficient expertise in the use of software will result in clumsy and superfluous searches, and insufficient expertise in the analysis of the data (concordances) will result in wrong conclusions, and in turn in bad translations. Thus to ensure success in the use of corpus resources enough time should be devoted to teaching search techniques, which are often specific to the corpora used (including the Web as corpus, e.g. Google advanced search techniques). Sufficient time should also be devoted to teaching students how to manipulate and interpret corpus data.5

4 This has, of course, implications for the assessment of the reliability of corpus data. Should ‘original production by a native speaker’ (as opposed to both ‘original production by non-native speaker’ and ‘translation’) feature as a relevant criterion in evaluating the reliability of results in a given corpus?5 On pedagogical applications of techniques for querying and interpreting corpus data, see Kennedy and Miceli (2001), Sinclair (2003, 2004).

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In many professions the use of a foreign language (most notably Eng-lish) is instrumental in reaching an international audience, and the ability to translate into the foreign language is often a necessity, as is apparent from the growing market demand for professional translators. Thus, while teaching non-would be professional translators to translate goes perhaps against the interests of translator training programs, it does seem to meet the needs of other professions and intercultural communication settings (Pym 2000:190-91). For language learners, as opposed to professional translators, the purpose of translating into their L2 is not that of attaining native-speaker competence. Indeed, as Cook (1999:196) argues, the case of professional translators translating into the L2 may be one of the few occasions when it may make sense for an L2 user to try to produce the “native” variety of the L2 in question. Teaching a foreign language to students in the social sciences aims at helping them become “intercultural speakers” rather than “imita-tion L1 users” (Cook 1999:202-204, italics in the original). I would like to suggest that corpus-based translation activities may go some way towards achieving this goal.

FEDERICO ZANETTINFacoltà di Scienze Politiche, Università di Perugia, Via A. Pascoli - 06123 Perugia, Italy. [email protected]

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Documents

Corpus-based Translation Activities for Language Learners