Translating punctuation: A corpus-based proposal to enhance students’ output.

Originally, punctuation carried out the primary function of providing indications for reading (intonation, pauses and prosody). Today, it is clear that punctuation works at a level which goes beyond prosodic and strictly syntactic phenomena. Punctuation should therefore be analyzed as one of the constituents of textuality, considering its role in organizing information and structuring it. Nonetheless, students of translation still seem to rely mostly on prosodic criteria or produce ‘punctuation calques’ which do not correspond to either syntactic rules or communicative purposes. This paper reports on a teaching experience carried out in two MA-level courses to test the efficiency of a corpus-based approach to enhance the students’ awareness of the role of punctuation and enable them to use it effectively and appropriately according to text type and target language conventions.