FOSTERING ACADEMIC LITERACY VIA CORPUS-BASED TRANSLATION ACTIVITIES
FOSTERING ACADEMIC LITERACY VIA CORPUS-BASED TRANSLATION ACTIVITIES

Summary/Abstract: Corpora are argued to enhance language knowledge and improve translation quality. For this reason, they have been increasingly used in academic settings. This paper deals with corpus-driven translation training at tertiary level and investigates the quality of the corpus-based translations of academic abstracts vs non-corpus-based translations. For this purpose, Italian Bachelor students enrolled in the third year of a course in Translation Studies participated in a translation project. The students were divided into two groups. The first group translated an academic abstract from their native language (Italian) into English by consulting the language resources they were familiar with, i.e., online multilingual platforms and online bilingual dictionaries. The second group used a bilingual dictionary indicated by the lecturer and a pre-compiled DIY (do-it-yourself) corpus of academic abstracts addressing translation studies, English as a second language and/or as a lingua franca. The paper finds that the translations performed by the first group of students had some inaccuracies, which were mainly concerned with word order, collocations, redundancies, and grammatical shortcomings. Conversely, the second group of students performed better, although, in some cases, influences from the students’ first language could be noticed. As a whole, the second group outperformed the first group, as their translations contained fewer grammatical and collocational issues.

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