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Corpus-based Translation Activities for Language Learners

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

Corpus-based Translation Activities for

Language Learners

FEDERICO ZANETTIN
Università 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

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

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
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
212 Corpus-based Translation Activities for Language Learners

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
Federico Zanettin 213

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.

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.
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


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.

On the use of Moodle as a virtual learning environment, see e.g. Seghiri et al. (2007).
214 Corpus-based Translation Activities for Language Learners

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.


Part of the final mark was also determined by a component of the course which focused
on oral expression.
Federico Zanettin 215

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
216 Corpus-based Translation Activities for Language Learners

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
Federico Zanettin 217

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
218 Corpus-based Translation Activities for Language Learners

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
Federico Zanettin 219

(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
220 Corpus-based Translation Activities for Language Learners

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. 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.


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?

On pedagogical applications of techniques for querying and interpreting corpus data,
see Kennedy and Miceli (2001), Sinclair (2003, 2004).
Federico Zanettin 221

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 ZANETTIN
Facoltà di Scienze Politiche, Università di Perugia, Via A. Pascoli - 06123
Perugia, Italy. fz@federicozanettin.net

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