Learner corpora, corpora of professional translations and creative writing in a course on translation of general texts: an action research project

Abstract

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-7968.2016v36nesp1p121This paper describes the design of a small action research project conducted in a course on translation of general texts from German into Spanish. The project methodology combines creative writing techniques with those of data-driven learning put forward by Johns (1991) for foreign language learning and applied by Laviosa (2014, in press) to translator training, as well as with the methods of corpus use for learning to translate proposed by Marco and Van Lawick (2009). The aim of the project is threefold: (i) raising the students’ awareness on the possibility of interference between German and Spanish past tenses when translating narrative sequences; (ii) allowing the students practicing data-driven learning about translation issues, and (iii) observing if these interventions bring about a qualitative change in their translation performance, specifically in the decrease of interference when translating narrative sequences with past tenses from German into Spanish. In the paper, special attention will be paid to the theoretical basis of the project, as well as to the methodological decisions involved in its design.