I corpora bilingui nell'apprendimento della traduzione. Riflessioni su un'esperienza pedagogica

Over the last five years we have been using small comparable corpora, i.e. collections of texts in two languages of similar types and on similar topics for the training of translation students. These corpora have been taken from a variety of sources, such as newspapers on CD-ROM, printend periodicals (either re-typed or digitized through OCR software), and the Internet. In this paper we describe some uses we have made of comparable corpora for translation and pre-translation activities and discuss students' analyses, looking at some of the limits and advantages of such corpora as a pedagogic resource, in particular in comparison with parallel corpora of translated texts.