This article argues in favour of an educationally oriented translation teaching approach in which students are surrounded by a stimulus-rich learning environment, with ample opportunities to increase their critical awareness, learning capacity, flexibility, alongside opportunities to practice translation and become familiar with technological aids. It is suggested that parallel bi-directional corpora may be useful instruments within a pedagogic framework, in so far as they provide learners with opportunities to observe norms regulating text production in different contexts, analyse the effects of socio-cultural constraints over translation practices and become familiar with the construction and use of different corpus typologies (parallel, comparable, reference).