The application of corpora in translation teaching: A critical review

Abstract

As suggested by its name, corpus-assisted translation pedagogy is placed within a triangle formed by at least three distinct but not discrete disciplines: corpus linguistics, translation and pedagogy. The interdisciplinary nature of corpus-assisted approaches to translation teaching more or less dictates that their investigation should take into consideration the influences and theories of these three areas. In the past two decades, there has been an exponential increase in research studies advocating the adoption of corpora for translation teaching. This paper brings together various strands of research and development in the field of corpus-assisted translation teaching over the past two decades. It begins with an overview of corpus applications in translation research, followed by a critical review of recent research dealing with: (1) corpus-based studies in language pedagogy; (2) different types of corpora used in translation teaching; and (3) issues and debates in the application of corpora to translation teaching. The paper concludes with a discussion of areas for further research.