Using corpora and retrieval software as a source of materials for the translation classroom

This article starts from a twofold distinction: that between corpora as documentation tools and corpora as a source of materials for the translation classroom, and that between corpus-based and corpus-driven approaches. Then a pedagogic framework for translator training is outlined in which the notion of objective is central and a task-based methodology is used. Within such a framework, four kinds of corpus-related tasks are presented and illustrated: cloze tests based on a bilingual corpus, multiple choice exercises based on a learner corpus, translation of short passages yielded by the concordancer and concordance analysis. The first three are corpus-based, whereas the last one is more corpus-driven and can be used to promote autonomous learning and discovery strategies.