E.P. Sosnina The paper presents an on-going research project to develop the specialized Translation Learners’ Corpus. It is the parallel corpus that consists of original English texts and their Russian translations done by university language learners. We study the potential of using corpus techniques with translation learners and teachers in a second-language learning context. For this project, «RuTLC» (Russian Translation Learner Corpus), original English texts were chosen according to the requirements for future translators (in professional communication), so the corpus addresses specific students’ needs and has limited domain, register and topic presentation. The text samples (about 10 000 words each) were saved separately as a specialized English sub-corpus to be translated (1 mln words). It has been added in parallel and dynamically aligned. The main research areas which the project investigates are error identification in English-Russian translation and analysis of translators’ errors. The results of such analysis are useful in Applied Linguistics and translation practice. In analyzing students’ translations we see what type of mistakes are frequent in the work of an individual student or group, and this knowledge allows us to plan the following lessons and correct our teaching techniques. Teachers can compare students’ mistakes, reveal the common ones, and develop the curriculum and textbooks adding usage notes and paying attention to specific translation problems.
In the pilot stage of the project we have analyzed the translations, revealed and identified the most common error types, tagged the texts by the error codes and count the frequencies and distribution of errors. These data are also to be discussed in the paper.