Virtual corpora as documentation resources: Translating travel insurance documents (English-Spanish)

The inclusion of documentation as a core subject in the curriculum of Translation and Interpretation degrees clearly underlines its importance to translators. Training in this discipline is considered essential for a translator given that only sufficient and conscientious work on documentation will allow an adequate translation of a specialised text. The sources of information that may be utilised by the translator are extremely varied, ranging from an oral consultation with an expert to a search using specialised glossaries and dictionaries. However, in the field of translation perhaps the most relevant documentation activity today involves the use of the Internet and, closely related to this, the compilation and management of virtual corpora.

In this chapter, we present a systematic methodology for corpus compilation based on electronic resources available on the Internet. The methodology is illustrated through the creation of a virtual corpus of travel insurance in English and Spanish, whose representativeness is subsequently determined by using a computer programme-called ReCor specifically designed for this purpose. Finally, some specific examples of possible uses in direct and inverse translations of this type of document are given.