Electronic tools and resources for translating and writing in the digital age

This article reports on the use of online language tools by the students of a course of English for International Relations. The students carried out text transformation activities, including the translation from English into Italian of extracts from a textbook of international criminal law and summaries in English of articles on humanitarian issues from specialized publications. I introduced corpora, translation memories and language-oriented searches using search engines as supplementary linguistic resources to carry out these tasks, in conjunction with the free online bilingual dictionaries and machine translation systems most students resorted to when engaging in writing activities involving an L2. I illustrate how these resources were used by the students, and discuss findings with respect to data- driven learning research.