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48 Silvia Bernardini and Sara Castagnolireasoning or a perception of relationships or patterns” (Prabhu 1987:46) in corpora.The starting point is always a genuine text. To introduce learners to thenotion of semantic preference (Sinclair 2004), for instance, they are given a textextract in which the word revocation is used (playfully) in the expression revocationof independence. They are then asked to find out what words follow revocationof in the concordance provided, drawn from the British National Corpus, and seeif these words share a semantic trait that allows one to group them into a singleset. After analysing the concordance and making hypotheses, the learners are askedto check these against the authors’ answers. Among the things that get revokedone finds licences, authorisations, certificates, concessions, patents and permissions.In other words, revocation is often found together with words referring to officialpermits of various kinds, though one also finds revocations of other legal decrees(i.e., constitution, edict, laws, order). The conclusion is that the things that are revokedare legal acts, and particularly concessions or permits. Due to the existenceof this semantic preference, that is not adhered to in the text under analysis, oneis led to interpret independence as being framed by the author as a concession –hence the playfulness. Awareness of this writing strategy, involving exploitation ofan established phraseological regularity, is crucial for a translator; yet it is wellknownthat intuition is unreliable when it gets to guessing collocates or detectingpattern (ir)regularities, especially with L2 speakers.Secondly, corpus evidence is constantly compared with information obtainablefrom resources that the learners are likely to be more familiar with (i.e.,dictionaries and the Web). Learners have to be highly motivated to keep using (andbuilding) corpora beyond the duration of a course. Corpus use is time-consumingand cognitively demanding, and time-pressed translators and students of translationwill gladly take any available shortcuts, unless we convince them that theinsights they gain from the corpus cannot be obtained from any other, more userfriendlyresource. For instance, in the unit on comparable corpora, students areasked to evaluate a (wrong) translation from Italian into English, and to providean explanation of the reason why the translator’s choice was not appropriate. Thesentence in question, taken from the website of an Italian wine producer, is:Per cogliere appieno le qualità di questo vino si consiglia di servirlo a temperaturaambiente, stappando la bottiglia un’ora prima di mescereThis was translated as:Serveitatanambient temperature; to fully enjoy its qualities uncork the bottleabout an hour before servingStudents are asked whether the expression ambient temperature is an appropriatetranslation for “temperatura ambiente”. They are encouraged to look this up inmonolingual and bilingual dictionaries and on the Web. In this way they assemble