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Chapter 3. Corpora for translator education and translation practice 41translation students and teachers realise the potential of corpus work for translatoreducation. Section 2 argues in favour of an approach that views corpus-basedtranslation teaching and learning as education rather than training,andSection4provides examples of e-learning materials following the principles of such an approach.As we shall see (Section 3), professionals still appear to be largely unawareof (or unable to work with) corpora. Developing appropriate learning materialscan help fill this gap. Yet in the long run widespread use of corpora in the translationprofession is bound to also depend on the availability of user-friendly toolsfor building and consulting corpora quickly and efficiently. These are discussed inSection5;Section6concludesbymakingsuggestions about how best to tackle thechallenges lying ahead.2. Educating educatorsIt is common practice to speak of the instruction of future translators as “translatortraining”. The term “training” implies that the abilities and competences tobe learned are acquirable through practice with the kinds of tools and tasks onewill be faced with during one’s future professional career, in an environment thatreproduces as closely as possible the future work environment. Widdowson (1984)contrasts the training framework, in which learners are prepared to solve problemsthat can be identified in advance through the application of pre-set or “acquired”procedures, with the education framework, whose aim is to develop the ability toemploy available knowledge to solve new problems, and to gain new knowledgeas the need arises. According to Widdowson, LSP teaching would be an exampleof a training setting, while general language teaching would be an example of aneducational setting.We may wonder whether translator education is in fact closer to the trainingor to the education end of the cline. Gouadec (2002:32) explicitly champions theformer position:[W]e are supposed to train people to perform clearly identified functions inclearly identified environments where they will be using clearly identified toolsand “systems”. [...] No serious translator training programme can be dreamt ofunless the training environment emulates the work station of professional translators.[...] [T]he curriculum should [...] concentrate on emulating the actual workconditions of language services providers.These views are certainly not unusual, and indeed are rather popular with studentsand prospective employers, who often lament a limited role of technologyin translator education. While one is obviously sympathetic to the general issue