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94 Rachélle GautonThese electronic corpora are all written, non-marked up and non-POS taggedraw corpora consisting of a number of sub-corpora stratified according to genre.The 5 million words untagged and unmarked running text Zulu corpus can becited as a representative example. This corpus is organised chronologically andis stratified according to genre as follows: novels & novelettes; textbooks; shortstories, essays & readers; dramas & one-act plays; religious texts; poetry; oralliterature, folklore & legends; Internet files & pamphlets.b. Large computer laboratories with Internet connections in which a series ofworkshops are run for the students so that they can be provided with hands-onexperience of the various electronic translation resources and translators’ tools.Students also take their final examination in the computer laboratory and are expectedto demonstrate that they have mastered the use of the various electronicresources and tools, including the use of corpora in translating texts, usually of atechnical nature.3.3 Prerequisites for the courses, with specific reference to student profilesA prerequisite for taking these courses is basic computer literacy, but in the SouthAfrican context, this requirement is not always as straightforward as it would seem.The majority of students taking these courses come from disadvantaged backgrounds,where they have grown up without easy access to computers in the homeor school environment. Although the students consider themselves to be computerliterate, this is often not the case from the lecturer or translator trainer’s perspective.Studentswould,forinstance,beabletohandlee-mail,havebasicknowledgeof how to surf the Internet and a rudimentary knowledge of a program such asWord and possibly Excel, but they will struggle in negotiating the Windows environment,working with different file formats, quickly familiarising themselves withnew software, etc. The students also commonly share the belief that the Africanlanguages (particularly the Bantu languages) cannot be used as high function languagesand/or in combination with cutting edge technology, and that this is solelythe domain of English, and maybe Afrikaans at a stretch.Consequently, before students are introduced to the use of corpora in translationpractice, they first have to be familiarised with various online resources thatcan be utilised by the translator, e.g., the use of search engines, online dictionaries,thesauri, (automatic) translators, etc. Students usually realise very quickly thatin a class containing students translating into some of the major languages suchas French and German, students translating into a lesser used language such asAfrikaans, and students translating into the previously marginalised languagessuch as the Bantu languages, the available online language resources decrease asone progresses along this continuum. Also, some of the ‘smaller’ Bantu languages