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Webquests in translator training: Introducing corpus-based tasks

Teresa Molés-Cases & Ulrike Oster Department of Translation and Communication

Universitat Jaume I The use of corpora has proved to be a valuable pedagogic resource, not only in language learning but also in translator training. However, corpora are sometimes seen by students as excessively complicated in terms both of the great amount of information they provide and the complexity of their technical features. As a possible solution to this problem, this paper proposes the use of corpus-based tasks in the form of a webquest, a task format designed to enhance autonomy and interaction and to be suitable for use in the computer-based classroom or in distance learning. We first present some examples of corpus-based tasks aimed at promoting student-student collaboration and student-teacher interaction, then offer a detailed account of two webquests designed to be used in courses for future translators. Keywords corpus-based tasks; translator training; interaction; autonomy; webquest 1. Introduction Over the last few decades, the use of electronic resources has steadily increased among translators. The growing importance of these tools for translation practice is also reflected in the increase in contents related to information and communications technology (ICT) in the curricula of translator training institutions and in scholarly publications on this subject (e.g. Aston 1999; Bowker & Bennison 2003; Varantola 2003; Sánchez-Gijón 2009; Frérot 2011; Kübler 2011). It is usually in specific modules on translation-relevant ICT that students first become acquainted with a wide array of electronic resources, including different types of corpora. Ideally, the corpus skills acquired in these courses will then be practised in different contexts (not just in translation but also in language and other classes), because training students in the use of tools like translation memories or corpora can only be truly meaningful if they get the opportunity to apply their newly acquired skills in translation or other courses (Oster 2007).

 

 

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The immediacy and apparent simplicity of bilingual equivalents offered by free multilingual on-line dictionaries and glossaries can easily lead the novice translator to perceive other types of reference resources as obsolete and cumbersome. Monolingual dictionaries, encyclopaedias and thesauri require a more reflective use and do not necessarily offer direct solutions. If students are reluctant to use these resources simply because they are more time-consuming, what can one expect of their willingness to employ such complex tools as electronic text corpora? For quite some time now, corpora have been promoted as valuable sources of information for translators and as useful tools in translator training (e.g. Pearson 1996; Peters & Picchi 1998; Bernardini 2004). But do we translator trainers really succeed in making our students aware of the benefits of their use and in developing the skills they need to use them? Our impression, based on students’ first reactions towards corpora, is that the success is rather limited. This paper explores one possible way of making it easier for translation students to familiarise themselves with different types of corpora and appreciate their usefulness in translating. We will first give a brief overview of the pedagogic use of corpora for translator training and of an interactive, web-based task format (the webquest), a tool which seems especially suitable for this purpose. Finally, given that translation training overlaps with language learning, we will present a detailed description of two webquests which include corpus-based activities aiming to develop linguistic and translation competence. 2. Corpora as a pedagogic resource in translator training In the last few decades, extraordinary advances have been made in terms of the size, variety, usability and – last but not least – accessibility of corpora. Since Tim Johns (1991a, 1991b) pioneered the use of corpus data in language teaching and learning in what has become known as data-driven learning (DDL; Johns 2002), corpus linguistics has found its way into a wide variety of approaches to teaching not only languages, but also language-related professional activities like translation. The use of corpora in translation studies is relatively new. Mona Baker (1993) was among the first to advocate this as a way of analysing the process of translation, and since then corpus linguistics has become a well-established research methodology in translation. Corpora have proved to serve not only as an excellent resource for the descriptive study of translation (Baker 1995; Kenny 1998; Laviosa 1998) but also as a basis for professional pedagogical applications in the field of translator training (Pearson 1996; Bowker 1998; Zanettin 1998). Candel-Mora and Vargas-Sierra (2013) show the rise and consolidation of corpus linguistics research methods applied to translation with an analysis of 389 bibliographic records on corpus linguistics applied to translation during the years 1980-2012. The

 

 

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389 publications include both theoretical and empirical studies, the vast majority of which (346) are dedicated to research, while the others are concerned with translation teaching (31) and professional applications (12). There is a common agreement that corpora are of crucial importance in translator education, because they promote autonomy, motivation and authenticity. Furthermore, learners who work with these tools “can become better language professionals in a working environment where computational facilities for processing text have become the rule rather than the exception” (Zanettin et al. 2003: 2). All in all:

The use in translation studies of methodologies inspired by corpus linguistics has proved to be one of the most important gate-openers to progress in the discipline since Toury’s re-thinking of the concept of equivalence. (Malmkjaer 2003: 119)

The fact that the use of corpora in translator training contexts is rapidly increasing and interest is growing both among teachers and researchers is, in part, due to a number of specialised conferences in the field of corpora and translation training, such as Corpus Use and Learning to Translate (CULT), Using Corpora in Contrastive and Translation Studies (UCCTS), or special sections within the Teaching and Language Corpora (TaLC) conferences. In Table 1 some examples of practical applications of corpora in the translation-teaching context are outlined. Going from micro- to macro-skills, we distinguish the following three levels: lexical questions, stylistic and textual problems, and strategic and attitudinal issues. This constitutes just a small sample of research currently being carried out on corpus-based translator training. A detailed review of the aims pursued in studies describing corpus applications for translator training as well as the strategies applied is available in Granger et al. (2003), Zanettin et al. (2003), Corpas Pastor (2008) and Oster and Molés-Cases (in press). Table 1: Research issues in corpus use for translation1 Level Area Issues Authors

lexical level

improving understanding of the source text

• the pragmatic value of “extended units of meaning”

Marco (2003)

• differentiating the meanings of polysemous words

Marco & van Lawick (2009)

finding terminological

• phraseology Laursen & Arinas Pellón

                                                                                                                        1 Table 1 is based on Oster 2007, where information about corpus type is also given.

 

 

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equivalents in the target language

(2012) • checking possible equivalents

Sánchez-Gijón (2009)

evaluating and choosing terminological equivalents

• possible solutions according to register and genre

Varantola (2003)

• comparing information from general and specialised corpora

Kübler (2003)

stylistic and textual problems

text construction and cohesive mechanisms

• checking average sentence length in order to evaluate stylistic adequacy

Varantola (2003)

• contrasting genre-specific cohesive devices like the use of anaphora

Laursen & Arinas Pellón (2012)

strategic and attitudinal issues

analysing how professional translators have dealt with problems

• structural differences between languages • culture-specific information

Frankenberg-García & Santos (2003) Pearson (2003)

solving implicit translation difficulties

• browsing through concordances (“found adequate answers for questions they did not think of asking”)

Varantola (2003)

decision-making • deciding which of the previously adopted solutions is the most suitable one

Pearson (2003)

enhancing language awareness

• comparing features of LSP (language for specific purposes) and LGP (language for general purposes) texts

Bowker (1999)

However, working with corpora is not without its problems. Aston (2009) identifies two sides to the difficulty of using corpora in a translation training context, one practical and one attitudinal:

One part of the problem is whether and how we can improve the efficiency of corpus use for the translator, facilitating both consultation and construction, and do so without compromising its quality as a translating and learning tool. A second part of the problem, however, concerns attitude. Not all translators, be they learners or professionals, appreciate that corpus use may have a medium- and long-term payoff which can override what they often perceive as short-term disadvantages. (Aston 2009: x)

From the student’s point of view, these disadvantages include the difficulty of simultaneously handling both the linguistic complexity of the material

 

 

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and the conceptual complexity of the tool. On the other hand, as Laursen and Arinas Pellón (2012: 46) point out, there is also a certain reluctance on the part of many translator trainers to integrate electronic tools, partly because of shortage of time to find relevant corpus-based resources, to design activities based on them or to teach learners how to use them. This reluctance may also have to do with the existence of individual differences in students’ abilities, as well as the fact that the multiplicity of possible results and interpretations makes the outcome of tasks difficult to predict. In order to make it easier to overcome these difficulties, a corpus-based task should meet a series of requirements. It should, for instance: • Enhance autonomy among students, making them more and more

independent from teacher intervention. • Allow each student to work at his or her own pace. • Guide them through the task in a structured way. • Give them access to all the necessary resources (e.g. links to the relevant

corpora, dictionaries, worksheets). • Provide all the necessary basic information so that the teacher can

concentrate on individual assistance where needed. • Provide additional information or explanation as required. • Provide opportunities for interaction among the students and with the

teacher. 3. Webquests A webquest is a task format that was first developed in 1995 at San Diego State University by Bernie Dodge, in which some or all of the information that learners interact with comes from resources on the Web. It usually contains creative, attractive and entertaining exercises that draw on cognitive processes such as proposing hypotheses, searching for information, solving problems, stating judgments, and performing analyses or syntheses (Starr 2000). Furthermore, webquests are generally based on group activities that require cooperation and role assignment (Pérez Torres 2005: 1), which is usually an additional motivating factor. A webquest is based on a doable, engaging task that urges the student not only to carry out some research but also to transform information (Dodge 1998). “A webquest elicits higher order thinking of some kind. It’s about doing something with information… The task has to be more than simply answering questions or regurgitating what’s on the screen” (Starr 2000: 2). In addition to this, the teacher becomes a guide rather than an instructor. All in all, webquests promote critical thinking, student motivation, cooperative learning, authentic assessment and technology integration (March 1998). March (2003) puts together the previous ideas and defines webquests in an integrative way in the following terms:

 

 

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A webquest is a scaffolded learning structure that uses links to essential resources on the World Wide Web and an authentic task to motivate students’ investigation of a central, open-ended question, development of individual expertise and participation in a final group process that attempts to transform newly acquired information into a more sophisticated understanding. (March 2003: 43)

In terms of structure, this task format usually includes the following components: an introduction, an explanation of the learning objectives, the work process in phases (scaffolding), a (self)-evaluation, a conclusion, resources and references, and a guide for other teachers who might want to use it. Although webquests can be found in a wide array of areas (e.g. art and music, business and economics, health and physical education, foreign language, technology), the majority are found in the social sciences, natural sciences and mother-tongue learning (Pérez Torres 2004). Webquests for language-related purposes differ from those used for other purposes in various ways:

The thinking processes in an L2 are more complex, the students spend more time on the comprehension of an L2 and the coordination of ideas than in their L1, this lack of command and comprehension may imply a decrease in the motivation of the students. (Pérez Torres 2005: 2)

Obviously these language-related difficulties are equally applicable in the context of translation teaching, which is why a major effort is needed to design the sort of webquest that guides future translators through a series of tasks devoted to practising not only translation, but also linguistic competence. However, due to its versatility, a webquest seems especially well suited to serve as an instrument facilitating the introduction of corpus-based tasks in the translator training classroom and promoting a number of long-term advantages, like autonomy or critical thinking. Webquests allow the teacher to provide step-by-step guidance on access to and management of corpora and corpus-based resources, and to foster the students’ translation competence and future professional skills. And once the effort has been made to design it, a webquest can be updated or adapted to further questions and diverse translation combinations, as well as several corpora and corpus-based resources. For the translation teaching context, the most interesting and profitable features of a webquest are the integration of technology, critical thinking,

 

 

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cognitive processing and, finally, not only cooperative learning, but also increased autonomy. The use of technology is essential from a procedural point of view in order to execute the tasks introduced in the webquest and to access the resources and corpora available online. Critical thinking and cognitive processing are key factors when: a) executing searches in corpora or corpus-based resources and taking decisions; b) analysing source texts in the L2; and c) solving translation problems. Cooperative learning and autonomy are important too, because they constitute two complementary methodological ways of executing translation-related tasks, and simulate two professional scenarios – namely an autonomous translator working for a client, or a group of translators from an agency working together on a project. Finally, coming up with creative and attractive tasks is not always easy, but when possible the designer of a webquest has to try to preserve these features to enhance the students’ engagement, in which case they are more likely to respond with greater commitment and interest and to make the most of the learning opportunity. And although nearly all the information that the learners interact with in a webquest comes from the Internet, private corpora or corpora that are not yet available on the web are also a very useful resource that the teacher can integrate into this series of tasks, above all in the case of specialised translation. The rest of this section highlights some possibilities afforded by the webquest format that can be used to enhance interaction in corpus-based language or translation tasks. 3.1. Student-student interaction: Collaborative aspects Teamwork being one of the essential features of webquests, it is important to exploit the possibilities offered by technology to encourage students to interact and collaborate in order to enhance the learning process. The following are examples of ways of doing this for different purposes. Sharing the process by translating in teams. In the professional world of translation it is not uncommon to see projects carried out by a team of professionals. That is why in translation classes professional teamwork is sometimes reproduced by designing tasks that include translating in teams, where each of the students is in charge of a different aspect (establishing meaning, drafting, revising, comparing with the published translation, etc.). This aspect can be included very efficiently by integrating additional tools into the webquest, such as Google Docs and the chat feature it provides. Sharing the product by constructing complex meaning. Searches in corpora or corpus-based resources often produce large numbers of results, and it is not always feasible for one student handling all this information alone. In the case of complex tasks, collaborative activities are therefore especially useful, because the students see the need to combine their results with those of their companions. For example, in the webquest Emotion concepts: pride,

 

 

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Stolz, orgullo (<http://goo.gl/QpZXs2>; cf. Oster 2010), students carry out a contrastive analysis of the emotion concept pride, in which they have to combine several languages, numerous sources of data input and different aspects of analysis. The webquest has been linked to several wikis located in a Moodle-based virtual learning platform, to which students upload their individual findings. The result is a complete description of these emotion concepts in the three languages, including information such as metaphors, physical reactions, and so forth. 3.2. Student-teacher interaction: Feedback and evaluation Working with computers, be it in the classroom or – even more so – individually at home, allows each learner or group of learners to work at their own pace. This causes a diversification of students’ needs, which then require more individualised teacher feedback, with different groups requiring the same (or different) information at different moments in time. In order to allocate teacher-time efficiently, several mechanisms that give students individual access to a more obvious kind of feedback can be introduced, thus allowing the trainer to concentrate on more complex or individual problems. Simple solutions such as multiple-choice or cloze tests have proved to be a very suitable option, because teachers can also provide access to the solutions to the exercises. If this is done via a link to a virtual learning platform, the teacher will be able to grant this access only after the task has been completed by the class. For instance, the possibility of giving simple solutions to a series of questions aimed at differentiating meaning has been implemented in the webquest The German conjunctions als and wenn and their translation into Catalan (<http://goo.gl/UqK0Ox>),   based on Marco and van Lawick (2009). Sometimes, due to the diversity of students’ needs, more elaborate solutions and feedback are required and assignments have to be handed in to the teacher for supervision. For instance, still in the previous webquest on polysemous items, we have used two different ways of handing in the assignments for the teacher’s assessment directly from the webquest. The most convenient is via a link to a virtual learning platform, where students can upload their exercises. If this is not possible, a PHP form that sends the student’s answers directly to the teacher’s e-mail account can be used.2 Usually one of the best ways to conclude a topic is to open a debate where the students can summarise their learning and the teacher can guide them to formulate final remarks. In the case of online learning, the debate can be

                                                                                                                        2 PHP (hypertext preprocessor) is a widely-used, open source scripting language.

 

 

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held through a chat server; for instance, in the webquest devoted to emotion concepts mentioned above, in a final task the students are asked to comment on their findings and to draw general final conclusions regarding the differences in expressing pride in English, German and Spanish. 4. Introducing translation students to corpus work through webquests: A pilot study With the aim of overcoming some of the difficulties of introducing corpora in the translation classroom presented in Section 2, a project was designed within the framework of the COVALT research group (Universitat Jaume I, Spain). Since 2001, the COVALT group has been working on the creation and the analysis of the Covalt corpus (Corpus Valencià de Literatura Traduïda) a multilingual comparable and parallel corpus (still under construction) made up of the contemporary translations into Catalan and Spanish of narrative works originally written in English, French and German. It currently includes 70 pairs of a source text plus a target text. Altogether it contains about 4 million words. Parallel to building this corpus, the COVALT team has been focusing on the possibilities of exploiting corpora in translator training. The task format chosen to do this is the webquest, due to its versatility and its interactive nature, as explained in Section 3. Thus the aim of the project reported in this chapter is to explore the possibilities of the webquest task format in the context of translator training for the different language combinations of Covalt (from English, French and German into Catalan and Spanish). The complementary aims of this project are the training of translation strategies for general or specialised (literary) translation classes and the exploitation of corpora as a query tool and documentation for translation. The two webquests presented in this pilot study contain corpus-based activities that were designed for a degree in translation from German into Spanish or Catalan. They show the transition from language-centred tasks in an initial phase to more output-focused tasks in a later stage. These tasks have been tested experimentally within the framework of Universitat Jaume I’s degree in Translation and Interpreting. The first webquest (described in Section 4.1) was tested in a class of German as a foreign language for future translators (language C) with a group of 35 second-year students whose level in German was approximately A2. The time devoted to doing these tasks was 120 minutes, and they were carried out in the interpreting lab, which is equipped with computers, headphones and microphones. The second webquest (described in Section 4.2) was executed by a group of 6 third-year students in a German-Catalan translation class. Their level of German is somewhat higher (B1/B2), but it is still important to develop language ability. The time devoted to doing these tasks was the same, but in

 

 

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this case the tasks were carried out in the translation laboratory, which is equipped with computers with Internet access. After each session, the students were asked to fill out a survey about their learning experience in order to gather feedback that will be useful for the design of future webquests. The results of these surveys will be reported on in Section 5. 4.1. Webquest 1: What’s in a prefix? The interaction of meaning and pronunciation3 This webquest (<http://goo.gl/QXxNYG>) focuses on German separable and non-separable verb prefixes and the interrelation between meaning and pronunciation, the main objective being the introduction of oral features. As to the linguistic content of this webquest, three pairs of homophonous verbs are used: 'umgehen/umg'ehen (‘to haunt’ if stressed on the first syllable, ‘to avoid’ if stressed on the second), 'umfahren/umf'ahren (‘to knock over’ if stressed on the first, ‘to make a detour round something’ if stressed on the second syllable), and 'umfliegen/umfl'iegen (‘to fall over’ vs. ‘to fly around something’).

The main aims in this webquest are to combine semantic and phonetic levels of analysis, to recognise formal and phonetic differences, to distinguish meanings, to practise pronunciation, and to apply this knowledge in a preliminary translation task. Corpus-based resources are employed in two different ways. First, in order to promote the autonomous use of corpus-based resources, students are instructed to actively look for examples and information about meaning in the DWDS, Linguee, Linguatools and Pons. Second, Covalt and the Belletristik corpus from the DWDS are used by the teacher as a source for suitable real-world examples to be analysed, commented on and translated by the students.4 4.1.1. Exploring meaning, equivalence and use

                                                                                                                        3 Although the original title and instructions of these tasks are in Spanish and Catalan,

they have been translated into English for the purposes of this paper. 4 Linguee (<http://www.linguee.es>) is a search engine that gives access to more than

100 million translations from the web. It offers any combinations of the following languages: English, Spanish, French, German and Portuguese. Linguatools (<http://www.linguatools.de>) follows the same principle, but in different language combinations (Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Greek, Polish, Czech, Swedish and Dutch). It offers more than 80 million bilingual sentences that have been professionally translated to or from German. Pons (<http://de.pons.com>) is an online bilingual dictionary. Das Digitale Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache des 20. Jh. (DWDS; <http://www.dwds.de>) is a German monolingual corpus-based resource and dictionary. Belletristik is a literary corpus integrated into the DWDS.

 

 

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In a preliminary task, students are given an introductory slide with some background information about prefixation, separable and non-separable verbs and pronunciation. This is followed by a document designed in the form of a Notepad from the website Learningapps (Figure 1).5 Here, they are first asked to observe in pairs some of the most common definitions of each verb (umgehen, umfahren, umfliegen) according to the DWDS. Figure 1: Exploring meaning

Secondly, as these verbs have several definitions, students are asked to find possible equivalents in Spanish or Catalan with the help of the context, first in Linguee and then in the bilingual dictionary Pons in order to complete the information (see Figure 2). Figure 2: Exploring equivalence

                                                                                                                        5 Learningapps (<http://learningapps.org>) is a website specialised in online learning, and

offers a great variety of other task templates including millionaire game, select quiz, word grill, cloze test, fill table, mindmap, pinboard, write together, etc.

 

 

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Here, first the students have to enter the equivalents into the notepad, then they can compare their results with the results of their classmates. Finally, in pairs, students are asked to look for examples containing these verbs in Linguatools (Figure 3) to observe language use. Figure 3: Exploring use

 

 

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4.1.2. Paying attention to intonation and stress In the second phase, the students are asked to listen to audio recordings with sentences containing the separable and non-separable versions of the verbs umgehen, umfahren and umfliegen. Here they have to pay attention to the intonation in order to determine exactly where the stressed syllable falls (Figure 4). The audio files were recorded using the software application Voki (<http://www.voki.com>), a website that specialises in creating speaking avatars. It must be said that although the automatic voice generation provided by Voki is a very useful resource, in the case of German separable and non-separable prefixes it fails to emphasise the difference in stress. For this reason, we made our own recordings using a native speaker. Figure 4: Listening task with Voki

 

 

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Each student then records the sentences she has selected from Linguatools in the previous phase and shares the recording with a companion for peer-review via Voki (with the ‘Send to a friend’ option) in order to get and give feedback about the correct pronunciation and stress. 4.1.3. Translating, comparing and debating Translation is reintroduced in the final phase where students are asked to translate a series of excerpts extracted from Covalt and the Belletristik corpus which contain the items that were previously practised in the webquest and include some of the problems they may encounter when translating from German into Spanish or Catalan. The students share their results with the teacher via Notepad, and open a debate in class in order to comment on possible lexical equivalents. 4.2. Webquest 2: Modal particles – Understanding and re-creating pragmatic value The main theme of this webquest (<http://goo.gl/mfQPKv>) is the acquisition, analysis and practice of a selection of German modal particles. There have been previous proposals for corpus-based language tasks related to German modal particles. For example, Möllering (2001, 2004) addresses the problem of polysemy through a series of exercises based on examples previously extracted from a corpus by the teacher, while Oster (2007) adopts a different methodological approach by granting students access to the corpus data with the aim of familiarising them with the strategies necessary for handling the corpus. This paper presents a similar approach in that students work with different types of corpora and corpus-based resources, but it takes things one step further by putting the emphasis on translation itself, integrating the two phases of comprehension and creative

 

 

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re-expression.

The main objective of this webquest is related to the comprehension and production of natural discourse. Through the different tasks, the students are led to realise the role played by modal particles in making a text sound natural and in adding a personal, subjective stance to its content. They also explore the possibilities offered by their mother tongue to encode similar pragmatic information, and critically evaluate the naturalness and consistency of their own versions as well as that of published translations. To achieve this, several corpus-based resources and corpora are used in different ways. Linguee and Linguatools provide direct contact with the corpus-based resources, because the students have to actively search for specific examples. With Covalt, the relation with the corpus is indirect, because it is the teacher who selects the fragments that the students will have to translate, analyse and compare. 4.2.1. Grasping pragmatic value in the source language In this phase, students are first given some background information about German modal particles and a document with examples of each of the selected particles together with information about the pragmatic value it expresses (resignation, desire etc.). For instance, Figure 5 shows the information that the student obtains after clicking on the modal particle denn. Here it can be seen that the modal particle can express surprise, recrimination or tension, and examples are given to contextualise its use. Figure 5: Explanation and examples of German modal particles

 

 

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4.2.2. Expressing pragmatic value in the target language The previous task is complemented with the construction of a collective database created through a Notebook. Here the students are asked to look for examples of specific German modal particles in Linguee and Linguatools and to work together to create a database of authentic examples to accompany their translations (Figure 6). It is quite a quick and easy task, because each student looks for just one example of each modal particle, but in the end there will be as many examples and translations as there are students in the class and therefore a rich database. The modal particles on the left are introduced by the teacher, and each student can add a contribution by clicking first on the specific modal particle and then on ‘write new post’ to add the examples found. Given that modal particles tend to be rather polysemous, an important step in this process is to discriminate between the different senses and to choose appropriate examples for each definition. Figure 6: Cooperative database with different translation options

 

 

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Finally, students put their creative efforts together in order to work in pairs on the translation of some fragments that include modal particles and that were extracted from Covalt, and share their results with the teacher via Google Drive. 4.2.3. Assessing results (student translations vs. published translations) The template used for this final task was Pinboard from Learningapps. Here the students compare their versions to the published translations (Figure 7), and discuss any possible differences, mistakes, negative and positive points or translation strategies amongst themselves and with the teacher. Studying authentic translations is always very attractive for students because they can see that there is not just one solution and that some possible translations can be very creative. It is a useful way of observing the professional translation market, and teamwork promotes a more critical appreciation. Figure 7: Comparing students’ translations with published translations

 

 

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5. Outcomes and prospects As teachers we observed a very active participation by the students and a high degree of engagement during the learning sessions. They interacted with each other, for instance by formulating questions or helping their classmates, but resorted to the teacher whenever they had doubts or questions. Our impressions confirm the idea that the fact that results from corpus-based resources are open and numerous makes them deal with and solve unexpected scenarios, and that this can lead students to work in a more autonomous manner. Both groups of students completed a short survey at the end of their webquest session to shed light on their previous knowledge regarding the corpus-based resources used in the activities and their learning progress after completing the tasks of the webquests. Additionally, group 1 was asked about their impression on the difficulty and usefulness of the task. As regards knowledge of corpus resources, overall, 83% of students had previous knowledge of corpus resources: the second-year students as a linguistic resource, while the third-years used them frequently for translation purposes. All the students agreed that both resources are useful for language learning and translating. Except for 2 cases in Group 1, all of them knew Linguee, but a significant number of students (31) of Group 1 were unaware of the existence of Linguatools, which is especially useful when working with German. Figure 8 shows the number of students that had used these resources before out of the total number of students from both groups (41). Figure 8. Have you used Linguee and Linguatools before?

 

 

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Regarding their learning progress, the reactions of both groups were highly positive and the majority of students said they had learned ‘quite a few things’ (Figures 9a and 9b). Figure 9a: Webquest 1 – How much have you learned about prefixed verbs? (Group 1)

Figure 9b: Webquest 2 – How much have you learned about modal particles? (Group 2)

As to the perceived difficulty of the activities in group 1, most of the students were able to handle the tasks without too many difficulties. On the other hand, the average assessment of usefulness of the task was between pretty and very useful. Figures 10a and 10b show the distribution of student’s answers. Figure 10a: Webquest 1 – How difficult was the webquest?

 

 

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Figure 10b: Webquest 1 – How useful was the webquest?

In general terms, both teacher observation and student responses suggest that the reaction to these webquests was quite positive, mainly because the students learned something new about the German language and about the utility of using corpus-based resources for language learning or translating. The study is ongoing, the next stage is to continue designing more webquests. Our intention for the future is to integrate these and other new webquests into a general framework designed for future translators, which will address some of the main complexities when translating from German into other languages, like Spanish or Catalan. These will be intended to cover some of the main difficulties that students face when translating from German, not only with general but also with literary and specialised texts. For more advanced students, the emphasis will be not so much on linguistic aspects but more on translation competence and the familiarisation with different types of corpora and their usages for translation.

 

 

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6. Conclusions The corpus-based tasks presented in this chapter are meant to serve as an instrument to facilitate the acquisition of linguistic and translation competence. They show a gradual progression consisting in an initial phase of linguistic comprehension and production, an intermediate stage of reformulation and translation, and a final phase of analysing and comparing translations. The students are gradually exposed to different types of corpora and are given the opportunity to carry out targeted searches for particular tasks. In this chapter we have only mentioned some of the most popular corpora and corpus-based resources for the languages included in the webquests presented here. However, the web offers numerous corpora in a wide array of languages that are available to be exploited in a similar way. Furthermore, the fact that the results from corpus-based resources are real and have not been previously adapted or modified by the teacher makes the students deal with and solve unexpected scenarios (e.g. they sometimes have to face too complex results from the point of view of their language skills, or they have to go beyond the teacher’s instructions when doing searches). Although this can be considered a challenge at first glance, this helps them not only to work in a more autonomous way, allowing them to think about what they are doing, how they are doing it and for what purpose; but also to act more cooperatively in class and to think critically. Due to their flexibility, accessibility and ease of use, webquests offer a favourable context in which to enhance teamwork and collaboration, give access to and promote corpus-based resources and improve linguistic and translation competence. Although designing webquests requires a time-consuming initial effort, these can be recycled or adapted to other languages and different specific translation problems while keeping the attractive, creative and entertaining methodology. Acknowledgements The work for this paper was carried out within the framework of the COVALT research group and its current research projects funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (FFI2012-35239) and Universitat Jaume I (P1.1B2013-44). References Aston, G. 1999. Corpus use and learning to translate. Textus 12(2): 289–

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