It is decidedly more difficult for students to translate something from their native language into their target language, than it is to translate from their target language into their native language. For Vietnamese students of Japanese, translating Vietnamese into Japanese is no exception; with Vietnamese-to-Japanese translations proving especially challenging. This research examines how, in the context of a translation course as part of foreign language education, corpus tools can be used to help students be conscious of the differences between Vietnamese vocabulary terms and Japanese vocabulary terms, and thus be better able to make natural choices of requisite terms when translating. The results demonstrated that through use of a corpus, students were able to use Japanese terms and collocations which reflected the Vietnamese texts they wanted to translate, and that they even demonstrated the ability to make vocabulary selections which were similar to native speakers.