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.
