Using corpora in specialised translation education

Straying beyond the boundaries of applied translation studies, as they were drawn by James S. Holmes in his envisioned outline of the discipline five decades ago, the present paper considers translation education to be an area of transdisciplinary research and practice at the interface between translator training and language teaching in higher education. Premised on this inclusive stance, that is consonant with the prevailing multilingual orientation in applied linguistics since the turn of the century, the paper examines the different ways in which corpora are or can be used as resources for honing specialized translation skills. First, it appraises the largely untapped potential of corpus use in specialized pedagogic translation and translanguaging at the upper intermediate and advanced levels of linguistic competence in language B, as described in the Companion Volume to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (Council of Europe 2020). Then, it analyses exemplary corpus use in specialized translator education. These two ambits of corpus use are investigated through the lens of the specific competence models that underpin them. So, corpus-aided translation and translanguaging in language teaching is analysed in light of the new descriptors contained in the CEFR Companion Volume (Council of Europe 2020). Corpus-aided translation in translator education is analysed in light of the EMT competence framework for 2018-2024 (Toudic & Krause 2017). The investigation is based on a sample of good pedagogic practices, and reveals commonalities and differences as to why and how corpora are or can be used effectively in specialized translation education. The paper concludes by offering some recommendations for future research.