Abstract

After verifying a dramatic drop in the quality of student’s translations facing the subject “Introduction to specialized translation” for the first time, we decided to implement an experiment with the aim of evaluating the usefulness of an ad hoc electronic corpus created by the students themselves. The objective was to improve not only the quality of their translations but also their capacity to translate specialized texts. This study took place in five different stages: phase 1, familiarising with specialized language; phase 2, analysis of the scope of the translation project, search of reliable sources and creation of the ad hoc corpus; phase 3, corpus analysis and extraction of terminology; phase 4, exploitation of corpus and phase 5, evaluation of the whole process by answering a questionnaire where students evaluate the usefulness of corpora compared to their usual terminology research methods.

Key Words: Electronic corpus; corpus linguistics; specialized translation; translation didactics; terminology