Corpora in Translator Training - A Program for an eLearning Course

Within recent years, corpora have gained considerable importance in Translation Studies, and a number of studies have also appeared which show their value for translator training (e.g. Zanettin et al. 2003). However, results from a recent survey reveal that current practising and trainee translators still have insufficient awareness of corpora and expertise in using them to help in their translation workflow. In addition, while corpus linguistics courses are offered at some universities, no materials for self-learning are available to our knowledge: such materials might not only complement traditional courses, but would also be of special interest for professional translators, who are often under serious time constraints. This paper presents a free eLearning course on “Corpora for Translators” which has been developed by the EU-funded MeLLANGE project in an attempt to fill this gap. It deals with the use of corpora for different translation-related activities (e.g. source text analysis, translation proper, revision, terminology extraction) and is tailored to the needs of professional and trainee translators alike.