Estrategias heurísticas con corpus para la enseñanza de la fraseología orientada a la traducción.

Abstract

In this work, we present a teaching proposal that has been carried out as part of the syllabus of Lengua y cultura “B” aplicadas a la Traducción e Interpretación (II) – Inglés. This is a first-year course on English language and culture applied to Translation and Interpreting that is taught in the Bachelor’s Degree in Translation and Interpreting at the University of Malaga, Spain. The main objective of this proposal is to train students how to use corpora (both monolingual and bilingual) and explore the possibilities corpora provide for the correct identification and interpretation of phraseological units in translation. This paper will pay special attention to cases where the ambiguity of phraseological sequences may lead to multiple interpretations. For the sake of the argument, the focus will be on somatisms (idioms containing terms that describe body parts), which will be identified and analysed in two Spanish monolingual corpora (CORPES XXI and eseuTenTen), an English monolingual corpus (enTenTen) and two parallel corpora (Europarl and Linguee, more specifically its English-Spanish subcorpus). Our teaching proposal consists of several learning activities. The first learning activity is a theoretical seminar in which students are introduced to core concepts (e.g. corpus, phraseology and translation). Then, students are prompted to use parallel corpora to find translation pairings that contain translation mistakes derived from phraseological ambiguity (second learning activity). In the third learning activity students are presented with some useful disambiguating items, so that they are able to identify the idiom, interpret it in context and convey its pragmatic and semantic load in the target text. This is the stage where corpora can play a decisive role as documentation tools. However, this is not to say that corpus query is without problems.