Emerging training needs: virtual corpora as resources for Public Service Interpreting and Translation training

Abstract

The increasing need for a linguistic and cultural1 mediation between public service providers

and users who do not have sufficient command of the official language of the public authorities

has contributed to the development of a discipline within Translation Studies—Public

Service Interpreting and Translation Studies (PSIT)—, covering different areas such

a healthcare or administrative settings. It seems that documentation is essential at these stages so

that the translator/interpreter can acquire the appropriate skills and knowledge to be able

to produce the target text. This paper describes how we have used a corpus methodology as

an additional lexicographical and documentation resource for the translation of healthcare

texts in the PSIT classroom. We show the corpus compilation process our postgraduate students

followed and how they worked with a well-known concordance program in order to analyze

their corpus as a source of conceptual, terminological and phraseological information