Using corpora in scientific and technical translation training: resources to identify conventionality and promote creativity

Since the first Corpus Use and Learning to Translate (CULT) Conference in Bertinoro (Italy) in 1997, the usefulness of corpora for translators and trainee translators has been highlighted. From an initial approach where translators compiled ad hoc corpora in their hard drive for a subsequent study with lexical analysis software, there emerged a new trend towards the use of the Internet as corpus. In this second approach, the Web is perceived as a huge corpus which is accessed by means of online tools which produce monolingual wordlists and concordances from texts available from the Internet or pre-existing corpora, or by means of bilingual or multilingual concordancers displaying aligned texts from international institutions' parallel corpora. Bilingual concordancers and translation memories are widely used by translators and trainee translators because of the immediate translation solutions they offer, but these tools can restrain creativity by offering conventional solutions and eliminating layout and multimodal elements in texts. The aim of this article is to describe the exploitation of quality corpora in a scientific and technical translation course, focusing on texts on health translated from English into Spanish, and on terminological variation as a reflection of creativity in language