SMALL PARALLEL CORPORA IN AN ENGLISH-ARABIC TRANSLATION CLASSROOM: NO NEED TO REINVENT THE WHEEL IN THE ERA OF GLOBALIZATION

One of the main advantages brought about by technology is the easy and quick access to electronic texts (Zanettin, 2002) as well as their availability on a large scale, whereas in the past only printed texts were available. Electronic texts can be easily retrieved, parsed, concordanced and aligned not only for translation research and practice, but also for translation teaching and learning. Using parallel (or translation) corpora in translation classrooms has now become common practice amongst translation teachers and students in the West. They are designed to make students familiar with the genres of texts to be translated and, thus, to enhance their understanding of source texts and improve their usage of target words (and terminology). In fact students are now confronted with copious amounts of both original texts and their associated translations (Zanettin, 1998), which will help them in their translation tasks, save them time, make their assignments more interesting, and also prevent them from reinventing the wheel. In this paper I will report on an experiment that was carried out at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of Sousse with undergraduate students to demonstrate how small parallel (and comparable) corpora can be used to enhance the fluency and professionalism of trainee translators and facilitate teaching and learning processes on the basis of a collaborative approach to the translation exercise (Bowker, 2002, author???s term). Small English-Arabic parallel corpora and other small comparable corpora taken, mainly, from United Nations texts, which can be regarded as reliable in an era where reliability has become questionable, are presented as an example of translation corpora used in the translation classroom. The findings showed an improvement in students??? translation skills and translation output.