In this first case study we have used a comparable corpus of English and Italian texts on wine tasting to revise a translation that we intuitively felt to be inexact.

The method we followed consisted in:

• First, looking up the ST corpus to check the co-texts of use of the phrase temperatura ambiente;
• Second, looking up the TT corpus to co-texts of use of two possible translation equivalents (room temperature and ambient temperature).

Our analysis focused on three main aspects:

• Frequency: room temperature is used frequently, like temperatura ambiente and unlike ambient temperature;
• Co-text: room temperature tends to co-occur with verbs referring to the action of serving wines, often used in the imperative mood (to give advice); the same applies to temperatura ambiente, while it doesn't seem to apply to ambient temperature;
• Textual hints: reading the concordance carefully, we noticed that a conventional reading of the term room temperature exists alongside the literal meaning, and we hypothesised that ambient temperature might refer to "actual room temperature", i.e. be a synonym of room temperature only in its literal sense. Since temperatura ambiente in Italian had a conventional meaning, ambient temperature was not the right choice.