Using Corpora for Helping Sudanese EFL Tertiary Students with the tasks of Arabic-into-English Translation: Moving Beyond Bilingual Dictionaries and Intuition

Corpora have increasingly been used in the field of translation and translator education. Indeed, as through monolingual, parallel and comparable corpora, translation teachers and students can gain insights into the nature of the target language and see what strategies expert/professional translators adopt to deal with typical translation problems (Hunston 2002; Pearson, 2003; Bernardin, et al, 2003; Bernardini, 2004). This paper, with reference to a Sudanese EFL tertiary level context, argues that using corpora in teaching and learning translation can be more beneficial tool for translation teachers and students to use than solely relying on bilingual Arabic-English dictionaries and intuitions. The paper shows some exemplary classroom activities of this corpus-based approach for helping translation teachers to raise their students ’ awareness about the typical translation problems they may encounter when translating from Arabic into English. Some of these problems can be summarised as follows: synonymy issues in translation into the target language (propositional meanings vs. expressive meanings), the choice of the appropriate equivalent in the target language, semantic prosody and translation as well differences in collocation and collocation patterns between the source and target language. Th