Corpus‐assisted translation teaching: Issues and challenges. KanglongLiu. Singapore: Springer Nature Singapore Private Limited, 2020. 168 pp., EUR85.59 (e‐book)

Abstract

In the last few decades, corpora have achieved a significant place in the field of applied linguistics, teaching pedagogy, translation studies and academic circles around the globe. As corpora has developed into the multidisciplinary approach to be used in mixed (both qualitative and quantitative) studies, developing linguistic corpora has achieved a significant interest in academics all over the world. The volume Academic writing with corpora: a resource book for datadriven learning by Tatyana Karpenko-Seccombe involves recently developed corpora-based material for the practitioners, scholars and researchers working in the field of corpus linguistics and corpus-based studies. All this is reflected in the diversity of corpus-based studies collection where linguistic, functional and cognitive approaches have been employed by scholars to make use of corpora. With four chapters, the impressive volume consists of three sections, introducing the practical implementation of corpora, corpus tools, and features of corpus-based studies and provides understanding about usefulness of corpora for researchers and practitioners in producing quality research.The first chapter, the introduction by Karpenko-Seccombe offers the purpose and outline of the book and the prevalent theme of the volume. Karpenko-Seccombe discusses in detail how corpus tools have been incorporated effectively in the academic research today at global level. Further, Karpenko-Seccombe presents how this corpus can be exploited autonomously by the researchers and academicians to make use of such corpus tools for conducting effective research.In addition, the significant contribution of this chapter is the brief introduction to a number of other concordancers (concordance program): BNC-English corpora (the British National Corpus, https://www.english-corpora.org/bnc/), SkELL (Sketch Engine for Language Learning, https://www.sketchengine.eu/ skell/) and MICUSP (Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers, 2009, http:// micusp.elicorpora.info/). In this vein, Karpenko-Seccombe includes practical illustrations and exercises for the practitioners to make use of these illustrations for effective teaching of corpora tools. Further, Karpenko-Seccombe makes a comparison of these tools as She says that MICUSP is different from the previous corpus tools in that it doesn't present results in concordance lines but highlights them in the source texts. You can access the full papers, which can be useful for academic writers, (p. 32).Chapter two provides the introduction to corpus tools, and significant functions of these tools. For instance, Karpenko-Seccombe presents the language pattern, and ways to identify the mistakes in prepositions by writers of second language with the orientation of concordance search. Karpenko-Seccombe provides the illustrations with the pictorial charts while using Lextutor (a free and open online corpus tool), and states how words are put in the tools to search recurrent patterns of prepositions used in the language. The problem that second-l...