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50 Silvia Bernardini and Sara Castagnoli5. Building corporaIn order for corpora to stably enter the translators’ workflow, however, one cannotsimply rely on well thought-out learning materials. It was previously suggested(Section 3) that corpus construction and use should also be made easier and faster,so that these tools can compete with others that translators use in their everydayactivity, such as TMs and the Web. 94.6% of the MeLLANGE questionnaire respondentsreported consulting the Web through Google despite several drawbacksthat most of them are aware of, such as the unhelpfulness of the sort order (20.7%),the lack of linguistic information (14.7%), the unreliability of frequency statistics(12.6%), or the inadequacy of context display (9.9%). This suggests that corporacould indeed play a role among translation tools, if remaining obstacles (especiallythe time needed for construction and the required search skills) were removed.5.1 Thepresent...One of the major achievements in corpus-based language learning in the pastdecade has been the creation of tools that allow users to consult the Web in a morelinguistically-informed way, and/or that facilitate the construction of corpora fromthe Web. While search engines such as Google provide fast and effective retrieval ofinformation from the Web, they are less than ideal when it gets to basic linguisticprocedures such as highlighting patterns (i.e., sorting results) or selecting subsetsof solutions, not to mention conducting searches for linguistically-annotatedsequences (e.g., all verb lemmas preceding a certain noun lemma) (Thelwall 2005).A solution to some of these problems has been provided by tools likeKWiCFinder (Fletcher 2004), an online concordancer that supports regular expressions,implements concordance-like displays and functionalities (e.g., sorting),and allows off-line perusal of the retrieved texts. Along similar lines, anotherfreely available tool, the TextSTAT concordancer, 5 allows one to specify a URL andretrieve a file or set of files from a single website directly from within the concordancer,thus conflating and speeding up the processes of retrieving texts andsearching through them. Corporator (Fairon 2006) only addresses the first issue(retrieving texts from the Web): it automates the process of corpus collection anddevelopment allowing bulk retrieval of selected websites that offer RSS feeds. Thecorpus thus created can then be updated regularly, and is searchable with a regularconcordancer.While KWiCFinder is designed mainly with language learning applications inmind (searching for a given word or expression as one would search the Web),5. http://www.niederlandistik.fu-berlin.de/textstat/software-en.html