Evaluating the process and not just the product when using corpora in translator education

Electronic corpora and corpus analysis tools are resources that can improve the way students acquire translation competence. If, as translator trainers, we wish to develop our students’ competence to solve translation problems, then we need to provide them with strategies to use existing resources and tools, to create new ones and to reap the maximum benefit possible from them. We advocate a type of training that facilitates the development of students’ strategies, and attempts to evaluate the acquisition of these strategies.

Our methodological approach is based on translation tasks organised around learning objectives and includes evaluation of the translation process and product. This methodology is student-centred, since it allows the student to be the focus of the learning process, and comprehensive, in that it takes into account the objectives and all aspects of the learning context in order to develop appropriate materials and evaluation.

We suggest that if one of the learning objectives within a translation course is to grasp how to use corpora, evaluation of this objective should include the process and not be limited to the overall quality of the product – the translation. Examples are given of how the use of corpora and corpus-related software can be evaluated other than by simply examining the final translation. The results of some of the students’ own evaluations of the methodology are included.