6. The use of corpora in translator training in the African language classroom: A perspective from South Africa

This chapter presents the translator training curriculum at the University of Pretoria as a case study to show how corpora can be used successfully in the training of African language translators, with particular reference to translating into the South African Bantu languages. These languages were marginalised and disadvantaged during the apartheid era, particularly as far as the development, elaboration and standardisation of terminology is concerned. Consequently, these languages lack (standardised) terminology in the majority of (specialist) subject fields which makes translation into these languages (and not only technical translation), an activity fraught with challenges. This chapter focuses on how training in the use of electronic text corpora, corpus query tools and translation memory tools can enable the African language translator to:

– mine existing target language texts for possible translation equivalents for source language terms that have not been lexicalised (in standardised form) in the target language;

– coin terms in the absence of clear and standard guidelines regarding termformation strategies, bymaking use of those term formation strategies preferred by the majority of professional translators;

– re-use existing translations in order to translate more efficiently and effectively and to attain some formof standardisation as far as terminology is concerned, given the lack of up-to-date and usable standardised terminologies in these languages.