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Chapter 6. The use of corpora in translator training 95such as Ndebele and Swati, have even less language resources on the Web thansome of the other (larger) Bantu languages such as Zulu. In addition, over theyears it has become clear that one of the biggest challenges for the trainee Africanlanguage translator is trying to determine the exact meaning of the source languageitem, where the SL is usually English. It must be borne in mind that Englishis these students’ second, third or sometimes even fourth language and that manySouth Africans know seven or more Bantu languages in addition to English andusually also Afrikaans. Because of the lack of terminology in the Bantu languages,students more often than not have to create translation equivalents, and in orderto do so, they must be sure of the exact meaning of the English SL term. It istherefore important that students are also introduced to online English languageresources that will provide them with this type of information, such as for examplethe excellent Visual Thesaurus. As indicated, students must be able to use searchengines, specifically in accessing texts written in (or translated into) the target language.Students are usually surprised at the number of sites containing texts inthe African languages that they are able to find on the net. Many of these sites areexcellent sources of parallel texts in all the official SA languages. Students are alsointroduced to methods for finding sites and web pages that are no longer availableon the net, such as using the Internet Archive Wayback Machine and the ‘cached’option in Google.As regards the profiles of the students taking these courses; they all translatefrom English as source language (SL) into their first language / home language, andthe breakdown per target language (TL) is asfollows:Afrikaans24%,(SASouthern)Ndebele 8%, Northern Sotho 12%, Swati 4%, Tsonga 4%, Tswana 12%, Venda28%, Zimbabwean Ndebele 4% and Zulu 4% of the total number of students.3.4 Corpora in translator trainingDuring the theoretical part of the course, students are familiarised with the differenttypes of corpora, how they are compiled, what their possible uses are, etc.During the hands-on workshop sessions, students get the opportunity to applytheir theoretical knowledge by building DIY Web corpora in their TL on topicssuch as HIV/AIDS, education, politics, etc. Students are also shown various sitesthat contain parallel texts in the official SA languages, and are given access to UP’slarge general corpora (cf. Table 1 earlier). 3When working with bi-/multilingual comparable corpora, students are madeaware that when the sizes of English and/or Afrikaans corpora are compared with3. See De Schryver (2002) for a discussion on African language parallel texts available on theWeb. Note, however, that since the publication of this 2002 article, many more parallel texts inthe official SA languages have become available on the Web.