Corpus-based translation in the tourism sector: a case study with final year bachelor students

Patrizia Giampieri, University of Camerino

 

patrizia.giampieri(at)unicam.it

 

Abstract: This paper presents a case study with final year students enrolled in a bachelor programme in translation studies. The students were asked to revise the English translation of a tourism text originally written in Italian (their first language). They corrected the text autonomously by resorting to the language resources they were acquainted with. Afterwards, they dealt with the same text by consulting a pre-compiled offline corpus. In this way, they had the chance to explore collocations, word usage in context and verify whether their translation candidates were acceptable. However, some students carried out the corpus analysis too hastily or superficially and either overlooked relevant synonyms, or proposed infrequent translation candidates. This paper highlights that corpus analysis can improve translation quality and help users make appropriate translation decisions, provided that they have developed corpus analytical skills. It also highlights that corpora can be valid complementary translation tools to be used in conjunction with other language resources.