The present contribution aims at offering a comparative analysis of some of the Italian translations of "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" through a corpus-based approach. Corpora can be used in a classroom of EFL or of Translation Studies, to draw students' attention towards the various translation strategies and the linguistic information useful in the translation and learning process. For such reasons, I intend to show how corpora can aid the learning and understanding of English as a foreign language, making students more autonomous and free to take responsibility for their own learning by looking at aspects such as verb use; lexical contrast (wordlists); syntax (collocates and collocations); clause structure; clause boundaries, cohesion and translation studies.