Corpus-assisted Translation Learning: Attitudes and Perceptions of Novice Translation Students

Technological competence has become critical for translators to keep abreast of the ever growing translation markets and the rapid advancement of technology. Translation trainers are advocated to focus more on technological issues to prepare future professional translators. Surprisingly, the recent study by Rico Pérez and García Aragón (2016) reported that many translators still prefer traditional offline tools or even use no computer-assisted translation tools. It is therefore necessary to understand what impedes or promotes translator trainees’ adoption of corpora in their translation learning so as to improve future pedagogical design of translation training.

Based on a large-scale online parallel corpus, this study aims to explore the potential facilitative and obstructive factors for routinizing corpus use in translation learning from translation trainees’ perspectives. Twenty-nine English majors in a Hong Kong university participated in the study, in which students’ attitudes towards using the corpus, their searching history retrieved from the corpus, as well as the post-training survey results are analysed. Findings revealed translation trainees’ evaluations of using the corpus in translation learning and indicated the possible facilitative factors and obstructive factors for routinizing corpus use in translation learning.