Pixel International Conferences

The aim of this proposal is to describe the practical applications of the online error-tagging environment and freely available corpus resources in translator education. Our teaching methodology includes 1) the use of comparable reference corpora for source text analysis and selection of the most natural sounding renditions and 2) the use of error-tagged translations (both current and stored in the database) at the editing and revision stage of target text production. Thus, we present an integrated approach to teaching corpus technology and employing online annotation tools in a practical translation class.

            While our applications of available ready-made reference corpora in translation generally follow the suggestions made in the ample corpus-based translation studies literature (e.g. Aston 1999, Bernardini, Castagnoli 2008; Pastor, Alcina 2009), we see our contribution in pulling together a set of corpus resources and developing query methods aimed at solving typical translation problems for the English-Russian language pair, which remains underrepresented in this respect. The truly original part of this paper is the design and potential of the error-tagging component of the methodology. It fits in the broad context of learner corpus research within its less popular strand of learner translator corpora. To the best of our knowledge, as of now there are about five projects of the kind available online, including ours (http://www.rus-ltc.org) and their practical applications still remain unclear.

             In this paper on the basis of our experience we will focus on the most effective ways to employ the select reference corpora in the English-Russian translation classroom and discuss benefits and drawbacks of translation error annotation as a method of student-teacher interaction.