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This article was downloaded by:On:
18 February 2009 
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Access Details: Free Access 
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Routledge 
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House,37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Perspectives
Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t794297831
Book Review
Online Publication Date: 01 May 2007
To cite this Article
(2007)'Book Review',Perspectives,15:2,143 — 151
To link to this Article: DOI:
10.1080/13670050802153863
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13670050802153863
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Book Reviews
Corpora in Translator Education
Federico Zanettin, Silvia Bernardini and Dominic Stewart (eds)
.
Manchester:St. Jerome, 2003. Pp. 154. ISBN 1-900650-60-6 (pbk):
£
19.50.This book describes a unique experience of building, developing and usingvarious corpora in the context of the translation classroom and grew out of presentations at the second
Conference on Corpus Use and Learning to Translate
held in Italy in November 2000. A variety of corpora are discussed, such asmonolingual corpora, comparable bilingual corpora and parallel corpora,including DIY (virtual), specialised and reference corpora, developed speci-fically with translation needs in mind. The main emphasis is on the use of corpora as teaching aids in the translator-training environment. It is thereforenatural that the volume starts with an introduction by Silvia Bernardini,Dominic Stewart and Federico Zanettin, leading experts in the field of corpusresearch. As editors of the book, they have summed up all the contributions.The first paper, by Jennifer Pearson, demonstrates how aligned parallelcorpora can help trainees see what strategies professional translators usuallyemploy to solve different translation problems.In the next contribution, Natalie Ku¨bler shows how the use of variouscorpora and corpus-query tools contributes to better and easier work of LSPtranslators. She describes the experiment carried out and argues that theintroduction of corpora in the training of translators can radically change theireducation, as ‘learners are not simply presented with evidence, but areexpected to browse corpora for themselves, without the mediation of a teacherwho ‘‘digests’’ data and offers generalizations’ (p. 10).Belinda Maia focuses on the construction of disposable corpora onspecialised subjects using printed texts and CD-ROMs and suggests thattranslator students should be trained to construct specialised corpora with theaim of information retrieval and terminology extraction. This is especially of vital importance for minor or ‘less prestigious’ languages, such as Portuguese,where reliable good-quality electronic texts are less available than in majorlanguages.Krista Varantola focuses on the use of disposable, ad hoc corpora intranslation. Her study is based on a workshop experiment employing theWorld Wide Web as a resource for comparable corpora of electronic texts usedfor lexical and textual management in translation. She concludes that moderntranslational competence should also include corpus linguistic knowledge,and prospective translators should be taught basic corpus compilation andobtain skills such as search strategies and search word selection, assessment of corpus adequacy and relevancy, evaluation and deductive analysis of acorpus, etc.The paper of Ana Frankenberg-Garcia and Diana Santos is an introductionto the Portuguese
 Á 
English bidirectional parallel corpus
Compara
, which is anopen-ended machine-readable collection of Portuguese
 Á 
English and English
 Á 
Portuguese original texts and translations. They describe its structure, basic
143
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principles of text selection and techniques of aligning source texts andtranslations.Tony McEnery and Paul Baker found out that despite the high level of interest from translators in working with non-indigenous European minoritylanguages, such as Tamil, Hindi, Urdu and Farsi, such languages are stillpoorly served with corpus/language processing tools in comparison withindigenous languages in Europe.Of special didactic interest is the paper by Lynne Bowker and PeterBennison describing the development and application of the
Student Transla-tion Archive
including all translations of the same source text, all translations belonging to the same subject field, etc., and the
Student Translation TrackingSystem
(STTS). They are used to select, manage and study the texts translated by students. In particular, the STTS allows a teacher to extract from an archivea corpus of translations of a given source text done by the students andanalyse them according to specific criteria, which, for instance, might be veryhelpful in discussing various versions of translated text segments in aclassroom.Although the use of corpus-based methodologies proves to be veryimportant in translation studies, there are, according to Kirsten Malmkjær,some doubts as to how wide the range of their uses is in solving real-lifetranslation problems. She argues that corpus evidence might be misleading insome cases and stifle creative inspiration, and that it is worth exploring waysof using corpora which may seem subversive of standard uses. As is evidentfrom the examples cited, her remarks concerning the need for a cautious use of corpora in translating might be true only of literary translation, where ‘it issometimes necessary to break a norm instead of obeying it’ (p. 132).All in all, the book under review provides a wealth of information about thestandard uses of various corpora as a translator’s resource. It shows how toselect electronic texts, compile corpora depending on the specific needs of atranslator and use them in solving a variety of linguistic problems. Althoughthe book is primarily intended for researchers and practitioners dealing withcorpora in translation education, it is also highly suitable for use as a coursetextbook.
doi: 10.1080/13670050802153863
Valentin Shevchuk
 Moscow State Linguistic University, Russia
 A Handbook for Translator Trainers
Dorothy Kelly. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing, 2005. Pp. 172, with glossaryand index. ISBN 1-900650-81-9:
£
18.00.Kelly’s handbook is neatly interactive, with direct questions to users in shadedframes. It is also suitably repetitive, enacting the sound pedagogical principlethat the same point has to be made several times, from different perspectives,for it to sink in.Each chapter begins with a ‘summary and aims’ of what is developed in thesubsequent pages. From Chapter 2 onward this is preceded by an outline of 
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Perspectives: Studies in Translatology 
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