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74 Carme Colominas and Toni Badialayout, but in the types of queries they allow for, and this even affects the exploitationpossibilities and especially those that imply comparing the results obtainedfrom several corpora. For instance, it is quite difficult to compare the usage of e.g.,ES/CA molar as verb (for ‘to be great’, ‘amazing’, ‘cool’, etc.) in the jargon of theyoung Catalan and Spanish, as the available corpus in one language (CUCWeb forCatalan searches) allows for searches by lemma, whereas the one available in theother (CREA) does not. A similar problem arises when we try to compare patternsof use of a verb like like in the BNC and mögen in the German IDS corpus. Despitebeing one of the best available reference corpora, the BNC is not lemmatised,which considerably restricts its potential use and the possibilities of performingthis kind of comparison with other languages for which a lemmatised corpus isavailable. In other words, the range of functionality for automated retrieval ofcorpora is greatly dependent on annotation, and differences between corpora inthis matter limit their potential usage considerably. Besides annotation, corporadiffer from each other depending on the query language used. Compare, for example,the different query syntaxes by using Xaira (to access the BNC) or CorpusWorkbench. Taking into account that translation students and researchers workcommonly with at least three or four different languages, they need to access constantlyseveral URLs in order to get familiar with different interfaces and querylanguages and, what is worse, to face the differences in creating concordances (byform, lemma or part-of-speech (POS)), in gathering statistical information, etc.,between corpora. As a result, the usefulness of resources, even when they exist,becomes far from evident for users in general, as too much time must be spent(especially by users that are not trained in query formalisms as is often the casein the context of translation) in order to familiarise themselves with the severalinterfaces and query languages.The two aspects we have pointed out as the most desirable aims, that is, theavailability of large and representative corpora and a more user-friendly access tothe several corpora needed, are being faced nowadays by some corpus developersby means of common platforms that allow access to several corpora eventuallybuilt from the Web.2. Internet corpora: An alternative to large corporaIn recent years the arduous and expensive task of building large corpora has foundas a source of linguistic data (Kilgarriff and Grefenstette 2003) real new chances inthe World Wide Web. Exploiting the Web as a corpus is becoming a real alternativeto the traditional building of large corpora, as can be stated by the Internet corporacompiled at the Centre for Translation Studies of Leeds (Sharoff 2006), the OPUScollection of parallel corpora, or the CUCWeb project developed by the GLiCom