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76 Carme Colominas and Toni Badiatheir respective translations into Catalan or Spanish or vice versa, about 4 millionwords). Due to the numerous handicaps of building such types of resources,as we can see from the examples we have mentioned, parallel corpora tend to bedomain-specific or relatively small. In this context, the OPUS collection becomesmuch important as it is based on open source documentation that can be downloadedas files, and constitute the largest collection of translated texts available.Training institutions can benefit from the OPUS initiative (adapting the resourcesto their respective interfaces) and they can contribute to the initiative as well interms of data or tools. Presently OPUS allows access to the following parallel corpora:EUconst – The European constitution; 21 languages (3 million words), OO –the OpenOffice.org corpus, (30 million), KDE – KDE system messages (20 million),KDEdoc – the KDE manual corpus (3.8 million), PHP – the PHP manualcorpus (3.5 million), EUROPARL – European Parliament Proceedings 1996–2003(296 million).The most obvious benefit in building corpora from the Web is that they areeasy and cheap to make. Furthermore, they reflect modern language use, are easilyextensible and updated, and promote the technological development of non-majorlanguages. Besides such obvious benefits, some shortcomings have already beenpointed out such as the fact that not all topics, not all text types are equally available,and that such biases become far more evident across languages. This is in facttrue. Internet corpora can no longer meet some of the traditional requirementsmade of corpora (e.g., to be balanced); however this does not need to be seen(only) as a handicap. Actually, with the exception of the BNC, most of the so-calledgeneral corpora are also heavily biased (e.g., towards newspaper texts, like the IDSor the FR German corpora, or towards literary texts like the Catalan CTILC). Internetcorpora are at least representative of the language on the Web, and this can alsobe seen as valuable information, e.g., from a sociolinguistic perspective; considerfor instance the possibilities of contrastive studies between languages and culturesby means of comparable Internet corpora. They can provide interesting and valuableinformation from a contrastive point of view to assess the impact of text genreand topic in Internet corpora across languages/cultures (Sharoff 2006). However,the real possibilities of carrying out such studies also depend on the possibilitiesof accessing the corpora through adequate interfaces.3. The need for common interfaces to several corporaAs pointed out in Section 1 above, the usefulness of corpora resources, even whenthey exist, becomes not so evident for users due to the fact that too much timemust be spent in order to become familiar with the several interfaces and querylanguages. The problem derived from the multiplicity of interfaces and query lan-