Abstract
The chapter describes uses of corpora to translate, practise and study translation, setting these against the background of more widely used translation technologies: computer-assisted translation and machine translation. It then describes translation-relevant corpus types and the needs of their users.
Starting with translation students and professionals, it describes bilingual-comparable corpora and parallel corpora. The former are collections of texts in two languages that have been assembled adopting similar criteria; the latter are collections of texts aligned segment by segment to their translations or translations aligned to each other.
These corpora are also of interest to translation scholars alongside monolingual comparable ones (collections of originals and translations in the same language). Two extended examples are provided of corpus-assisted activities: the first shows how an instance of reference use (checking if two look-alike words in French and Italian are good translation equivalents) can turn into a more structured learning experience; the second, research-oriented, one looks at the frequency of nominal premodification and postmodification in a monolingual comparable corpus of translated and original English.
The chapter concludes by looking ahead at the ways in which corpora and corpus methods are likely to further contribute to translation teaching, practice and research in the future.