Assessing terminology and phraseology in specialised translation pedagogy using translationQ

Terminology and phraseology are the major hurdles in the development of one of the core components of any model describing translation competence, i.e. thematic competence (EMT Expert Group, 2009; Hurtado Albir 2017). This implies that any LSP translation course should focus on and help acquire and retrieve the specific terminology and phraseology adopted in the different subject fields. This paper proposes an approach to the analysis and revision of terminological and phraseological errors in the field of astronomy using translationQ (van Egdom, 2021; van Egdom et al., 2018), a computer-assisted revision tool which supports educators in translation revision and assessment, especially with large groups of students. The paper explains how multiple translations of the same source text can be simultaneously revised and assessed, and shows how errors can be retrieved from the revision memory for analysis and teaching purposes. The study considers the terminological and phraseological errors in a corpus of 196 Italian translations of popular science articles on astronomy made by two cohorts of MA translation trainees at the end of the first-year course in specialised translation. The paper investigates the number and types of errors made by the participants – also from a contrastive perspective – and outlines the possible reasons behind them. Finally, it offers an overview of the main applications and the benefit-cost ratio of computer-assisted revision through translationQ.