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Chapter 3. Corpora for translator education and translation practice 49some evidence pointing at the fact that room temperature would seem to be a betterchoice (but not enough to understand exactly the differences in meaning andusage between the two expressions). They are then given concordances for “temperaturaambiente”, room temperature and ambient temperature, obtainedfromaspecialised comparable corpus of English and Italian wine tasting texts. Since bothEnglish phrases are attested in the corpus, one wonders whether both are in factcorrect, i.e., whether they are simply synonymous. From this point onwards, studentsare taken step by step through an analysis of corpus evidence that leads themto conclude that ambient temperature is the actual temperature of the surroundingenvironment, while room temperature refers conventionally to a temperatureof about 18–20 ◦ C (regardless of the actual temperature of the room one is in).Lastly, the potential for serendipitous learning activities is not neglected(Bernardini 2000). When working with parallel corpora, for instance, learners areasked to identify all the different ways in which the Italian adjective “propositivo”as in “avere un ruolo propositivo” can be translated into English, drawing evidencefrom dictionaries, the Web and a corpus of EU Parliament texts. While dictionariesand the Web prove of little help, the corpus suggests one principal equivalent(proactive), and several alternative paraphrases. In the course of this activity, thestudents’ attention is drawn to two concordance lines in which the expression (takethe) offensive is used. While for the purposes of the current problem these linescould simply be discarded, they can also provide the starting point for further,serendipitous corpus analyses. Starting from the following question:Does the adjective offensive seem to collocate with words that can be consideredsimilar to those which “propositivo” collocates with?Students are asked to compare concordances for offensive/take the offensive and for“propositivo” in reference corpora of English and Italian. They soon find that thetwo expressions differ with regard to their semantic prosodies (“propositivo” beingused in essentially positive co-texts and offensive being used in negative co-texts)and preferences (“propositivo” collocating with “referendum” and with abstractwordssuchas“capacità”(capacity)“ruolo”(role), “spirito” (spirit), “fase” (phase),and offensive collocating with language and content as well as military terms such asweapon, lineman and operation). The latter task is not directly relevant to the parallelcorpus activity, yet it stimulates curiosity about language and about translatorstrategies, and reminds students that different types of corpora can be useful fordifferent purposes, and that one often needs to combine them (i.e., using parallelcorpora to develop hypotheses and comparable corpora to test them).Summing up, the rationale behind these materials is that the technologicalaspects of translation work cannot be severed from its cognitive aspects. This isbecause, in an education-oriented framework, one does not simply teach aboutcorpora, but rather teaches to translate with corpora.