Translator training, English language teaching and corpora: Scenarios and applications

The importance of translation as an academic discipline is now firmly acknowledged, and so is research on translator training. In this field, however, there seems to be a void concerning language teaching (in this article, English). This contribution will discuss how integrating corpora into English language teaching for translator training allows to overcome the major limits of English course books for general purposes, which do not promote the teaching/learning of the language from a contrastive viewpoint and do not tackle domain-specific languages. Starting from research on translator competence, the role of bilingual competence will be identified along with its positive repercussion on other sub-competences. The communicative approach in ELT will be contrasted with the goals of translator training, so as to understand the areas where ELT for TT has to be redesigned and how corpora might contribute to this goal.