Ad-hoc specialized corpora in translation teaching
A progress report on the translation of web-based heritage tourism at the MA level
This paper shows how building a specialised corpus of heritage tourism texts (Heritage Tourism Corpus — HT Corpus) represents
the ideal trade-union between the need of developing lingua-cultural competence in a specialized language and training
the ability of translating tourist texts from Italian to English especially when it comes to domain-specific terminology and
cultural-specific items.
The HT Corpus comprises texts from anglophone heritage tourism websites (approx. 1 mln words). It was built by professors at
the University of Bologna as part of an MA course on English for Special Purposes and translation. This paper thus contains a progress
report relaying preliminary findings from the classroom. Within this MA course, the use of the HT Corpus has a twofold aim: (1) letting
students familiarise and investigate the ESP of tourism by perusing the HT Corpus mainly with frequency lists, collocations and keywords;
(2) aiding them in the translation of Italian heritage tourism source texts (STs) into English target texts (TTs).
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 1.1Heritage tourism: UNESCO and the UNWTO
- 1.2Heritage tourism in the Italian context and its ties with translation
- 2.Specialized translation, the LSP of tourism and Corpus Linguistics
- 3.Ad-hoc specialized corpora in the translation class
- 3.1The Heritage Tourism Corpus
- 1.1Using the HTC in class
- Task 1.Observing a word list and making hypotheses
- Task 2.Reading and sorting concordance lines and analysing collocates
- Translation Task 1.Analysing a translation
- Translation Task 2.Checking a translation equivalents — is this the right choice?
- 4.Preliminary results
- 5.Conclusion
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References