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chapter 5The real use of corpora in teachingand research contextsCarme Colominas and Toni BadiaUniversitat Pompeu FabraThe relevance of corpora in translation studies has often been stressed in theliterature during the last decade (Zanettin et al. 2003; Olohan 2004; Laviosa2003). The advantages of corpora as complementary resources to dictionaries,terminologies, etc. have been recognised, and actually the use of corpora astranslation resources and of corpus analysis software in general has becomepart of the syllabus of translation studies. However, the real use of corpora intranslation studies still faces (some) practical problems/limitations, as alreadypointed out by Granger (2003): on the one hand, in some cases, sufficiently largecorpora that are representative of modern language do not exist, and on theother, interfaces for accessing corpora are not user-friendly enough to satisfy thereal needs of translation students and researchers. In this chapter we deal withthese kinds of problems by discussing the weak and strong points of currentcorpora interfaces and referring to improvements that have already been madeand that should continue to be developed in the future. The chapter ends witha revision of corpus-based applications in translation training contexts and incross-linguistic research.1. Requirements of corpora for translation teachingIn the last decade, the advantages of corpora used by translators in educationaland training institutions have been repeatedly pointed out at a large number ofcongresses (PALC 2003, CULT and TALC in their various editions) and in a largenumber of publications (Teubert 1996; Granger (ed.) 2003; Varantola 2000). However,as becomes obvious in the training context, the real use of corpora is stilllimited by some practical problems to be addressed in this section.Let us start reviewing the kind of information translation students and researchersactually need. According to our experience as translation trainers, thefirst information source for translation students, especially for beginners, is stillmono- and bi-lingual dictionaries. Consequently, the information which theyare interested in finding corpora is mainly that which is not well represented in