Resources used by Translation students to search for information on collocations

Abstract

The documentation phase, which includes the search for phraseological information, is an essential stage in the translation process. Developments in recent years have led to a change in translators’ consultation habits. If in the past translators relied almost exclusively on dictionaries to carry out their work, nowadays we have platforms which, without being conceived as lexicographical or terminological resources, function as such. We are referring in particular to the rise of automatic translation programmes and virtual platforms such as Linguee. Thus, learning the resources that Translation students use to obtain collocational information is essential to improve the efficiency of consultation and to guarantee quality translations. In this regard, this research examined the resources that 217 undergraduate and Master's Translation students used to obtain collocational information and identified significant differences between students from the different years. A questionnaire was designed to collect the data. The results showed that search engines such as Google, web services (e.g. Linguee) or machine translation programmes (e.g. DeepL) were used much more frequently by students than dictionaries or corpus analysis tools (e.g. Sketch Engine) to search for collocational information. This study therefore highlights the urgent need to include training in machine translation and post-editing in Translation studies.