Developing translation strategies and cultural awareness using corpora and the web

Corpora, as we all know, can be extremely useful to translators and in the classroom. Translators can explore them to find lexical items, collocative patterns, phraseology etc. Teachers can use wordlists, concordances, keyness and frequencies to create exciting activities. Students can develop awareness and self confidence, autonomy and accuracy in L2 and translate more effectively, but introducing corpora in the classroom is not an easy task: most of the experiences described by research articles, books and online publications illustrate either advanced and highly motivated students who are able to collect and sometimes annotate their own corpus, or a presentation to the classroom of the results of a piece of research previously conducted by the teacher. The aim of the paper is to suggest an approach leading to inductive discovery of language patterns and usage through activities based on selected online resources which are more familiar to students but can nonetheless gradually develop autonomy and methodological soundness.