ENHANCING TRANSLATION COMPETENCE THROUGH AN ENGLISH-SPANISH SENTENCE-ALIGNED PARALLEL CORPUS OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY TEXTS

Resumen

This article describes the use of an English-Spanish Parallel Corpus of Science and Technology Texts which pursues the objective of enhancing the translation competence of the fourth-year students of the degree course English Language with Second Foreign Language (French), at Universidad Central “Marta Abreu” de Las Villas. The research adopted a mixed-method approach design for collecting, analyzing, and interpreting the data related to the translation of science and technology texts, and to diagnose the needs of the students in that respect. The design of the Corpus followed the guidelines of corpus linguistics as a methodology. A corpus of 50 science and technology texts in English, and their translations into Spanish, on the domains of medicine, physics, chemistry and artificial intelligence, was compiled and processed using Corpus processing tools such as OmegaT aligner and Xbench software. It provides a wide range of lexical, syntactical and textual examples in English with their equivalents in Spanish, in order to help students integrate the necessary knowledge and skills to translate those texts, through a process-oriented approach to translation. The corpus derived a word bank of science and technology terms and a proposal of corpus-based exercises to be used in teaching translation.