DIY Corpora: The WWW and the Translator

The WWW is the single largest existing repository of electronic texts, and has recently attracted the attention of researchers involved in translator training as a suitable source of texts for the creation of "disposable corpora". These are small, specialized corpora created ad-hoc to serve the needs of the translator for a specific translation project, and their value lies not only in their analysis but even more so in their creation. This approach complements a number of studies which have been carried out on the use of small corpora for language learning and translator training, where the main focus is on methods and techniques for analysing texts already collected by the teacher. This paper presents an experiment which was carried out at the School for Translators and Interpreters of the University of Bologna in Forlì with third and fourth year translation students in the context of a course on computer assisted tools. Students were given a text to translate and asked to search the Internet, select suitable web pages in the target language, and download them on disk. In this way, while cyclically performing the translation and adding material to the corpus as the translation proceeds, they were able to familiarize themselves with the topic of the translation at hand, to select texts according to text type, to assess the reliability of text sources and evaluate the perspective readership. These DIY corpora were then browsed switching between a full text mode and a concordancing, and learners were able to tackle many translation problems related to specific terminology and phraseology..