Abstract
The paper analyses key topics found in the conferences organised at the International Maritime Organisation from 2018 to 2024 to prepare interpreter trainees subject knowledge in maritime community for their booth practice at the IMO on yearly basis. To achieve this goal, we compiled a corpus containing all the summaries of meetings organised by the IMO Assembly, IMO council, and 12 IMO (sub)committees, including Marine Environment Protection Committee (MEPC), Maritime Safety Committee (MSC), etc. The size of the corpus is around 10 million words. Sketch Engine was used to determine top frequent words and phrases representing key topics. Collocations and concordance analyses were performed surrounding such top frequent words and phrases including shipping, maritime, safety, member states, sustainable development, international shipping. In addition, critical discourse analysis was used to interpret linguistic facts through the lenses of an actual maritime setting. The results help students to understand the key topics discussed in maritime community, grasp overarching subject knowledge and learn typical usage of maritime English to assist their specialised interpreting. This study is an example of how translation and interpreting trainers can bridge the gap between corpus and classroom in English for specific purposes. This specialized corpus in marine English has been instrumental in assisting students to get rich contextual information of maritime conferences. Studying the distribution of the most frequent collocations of words that denote key concepts in maritime area can help students better understand the language in these specific contexts.