A corpus approach to avoiding standardized word order in translation Loock, Rudy (2020). It’s non-canonical word order that you should use! A corpus approach to avoiding standardized word order in translated French. In Sylviane Granger & Marie-Aude Lefer (eds) Translating and Comparing Languages: Corpus-based Insights. Corpora and Language in Use Proceedings 6, Louvain-la-Neuve: Presses universitaires de Louvain, pp. 69-85. It’s non-canonical word order that you should use! A corpus approach to avoiding standardized word order in translated French Rudy Loock Université de Lille, France & UMR “Savoirs, Textes, Langage” du CNRS Abstract In this article, through the use of several corpora containing original and translated texts, we investigate the use of non-canonical word order in EN-FR texts translated by students in order to determine whether target language norms are respected. We first provide information on cross-linguistic differences between original English and original French, and then compare these results with the characteristics of students’ translations. Our goal is clearly pedagogical: we aim to use data from electronic corpora to sensitize students to differences between their use of the French language in their translations and original French. This is particularly important because of the latest developments of machine translation, which make it crucial for translators to determine their added value over machine-translated texts; we therefore also analyze a sample of machine-translated texts. We conclude on the importance of respecting target language norms in relation to word order to increase naturalness and translator invisibility. 1. Introduction: definitions and starting point The aim of this article is to show how the use of different electronic corpora in translation training, containing original and translated texts, can help sensitize students to the importance of word order for the idiomaticity/naturalness of their translations. This is a methodology that we have described elsewhere for comparative grammar in general (Loock, to appear), but our focus here is on non-canonical (or marked) word order in English and French. By “non- canonical” we mean any word order that deviates from the standard, canonical, by-default Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) word order (1). In this article we focus particularly on those structures that are known to be problematic for English-French translators. We investigate the use of: - Clefting (2), where the sentence is divided into two parts, a focused element introduced by it + BE/ce + ÊTRE, followed by a structure similar to a relative clause; - Pseudo-clefting (3), where the subject or the complement of the SVO structure is a WH-/ce QU- nominal relative clause; - Left/right dislocation (4), where an element of the sentence is preposed/postposed while a referential pronoun is kept in the element’s original position; - Extraposition (5), where an element, generally a clause, is postposed and replaced with a substitute form (it in English, il in French);