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Chapter 5. The real use of corpora in teaching and research contexts 73With respect to the size, besides the British National Corpus 1 (100 millionwords), there are other large corpora for major European languages like the IDS(Institut für Deutsche Sprache) corpus 2 for German with 1 billion words, theCREA 3 (Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual) for Spanish with over 200million words and the CORIS/CODIS 4 (Dynamic Corpus or Written Italian) forItalian with 100 million words. However, there is still a lack of large corpora forother major European languages, and particularly for less-studied languages likeSerbian, Polish or Basque. As far as the representativeness is concerned, until nowit has been extremely difficult to build large corpora that can satisfy the demandof being representative of modern language. The problem lies in the fact that thistype of resource requires a large building effort and has, at the same time, quite ashort “lifetime”, as it becomes outdated in a relatively short time. Even the BNCdoes not reflect the language of the last 15 years, so that, for instance, a neologismlike malware has no occurrences in the corpus. This is the reason why recently thestatic corpus model has been substituted by the so-called monitor corpora, whichare constantly updated to track rapid language changes; the CREA corpus, for instance,has been designed as a monitor corpus which is periodically updated sothat it always represents the last twenty-five years of the history of Spanish. Buttaking into account the high price of making representative corpora of modernlanguage, on the one side, and the increasing possibilities offered by the Web as asource of linguistic data (Kilgarriff and Grefenstette 2003), on the other, it seemsquite reasonable to state that the future of large corpora lies in the Internet as wewill see in Section 2.In addition to the availability of large corpora that are representative of modernlanguage, the real needs in training contexts also require quick, user-friendlyaccess to the different corpora types (monolingual source and target corpora,as well as bilingual). This requirement stems from the fact that one of the importantpoints often made by translation trainers/trainees and researchers whenconfronted with the range of electronic resources available in general, is that theyrecognise the potential usefulness of the data and the tools, but are unlikely tohave the time to acquaint themselves with the software. This fact seems particularlytrue for corpora, if we consider the present state of affairs, referring to thelack of uniform interfaces for accessing resources. Interfaces differ not only in their1. See The British National Corpus, version 2 (BNC World). 2001. Distributed by Oxford UniversityComputing Services on behalf of the BNC Consortium. http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/2. http://www.ids-mannheim.de/cosmas2/3. REAL ACADEMIA ESPAÑOLA: Database (CORDE) [online]. Corpus diacrónico del español.http://www.rae.es4. http://corpora.dslo.unibo.it/coris_ita.html