English for tourism in the non-native english classroom: machine translation and corpora

This chapter focuses upon English for tourism in the foreign-language classroom, with particular attention to the translation of tourist texts from Italian to English, and considers some of the language resources available to learners. Machine translation (MT) can constitute an important aid in the English for tourism classroom, but despite recent improvements, the output of machine translators is not always reliable, notably within the domain of collocation. Since collocation is often beyond the expertise of even the most advanced L2 students (students of foreign languages), further assistance is needed in order to tidy up MT outcomes. Large monolingual corpora are particularly useful for the purpose of obtaining collocation data and thus of enhancing the quality of machine-generated texts. At the same time, it is shown that the corpus user must possess the necessary intuitions to interpret the data and make appropriate choices.