Exploring idioms of feelings and emotions through an English–Spanish parallel corpus

Abstract

This research presents a pedagogical proposal that integrates the English-Spanish parallel corpus (PaEnS)

into the teaching of English idioms related to feelings and emotions. After a brief overview of the role of parallel corpora in foreign language teaching and learning, and a look at the definition, classification, and usefulness of English idioms as well as their challenges in translation, the present chapter outlines four context-based, data-driven tasks. Specifically, the tasks involve guessing the meaning of the idioms from context, corpus exploration, idiom classification, and translation analysis. Additionally, the research aims to (1) explore how selected English idiomatic expressions are translated into Spanish in the corpus, and (2) identify cross-linguistic patterns and translation strategies that can enhance learners’ understanding of figurative expressions.