The obvious conclusion to be drawn from these activities is that translator training can benefit a great deal from what corpora and corpus analysis have to offer. Furthermore, corpus resources have been envisaged – mainly but not exclusively – as sources for classroom materials and activities rather than documentation tools.

The more highly skilled the student is in the use of corpora, the more autonomous their work can be. However, this sort of skill – like many others – is not acquired overnight, and it makes sense to move along the two axes (corpus-based and corpus-driven work) simultaneously, so that the student can gradually shift from the former to the latter. Only a certain degree of competence on the trainee’s part can justify the claim that “[t]he greatest pedagogic value of the instrument [i.e. corpora] lies, we suggest, in its thought-provoking, rather than question-answering, potential” (Bernardini, Stewart and Zanettin 2003: 11).