Abstract

The number of e-resources giving access to electronic corpora is increasing every day, since it is proved that “they provide highly valuable lexical material, patterns, attestations of use, etc.” (Leroyer 2015: 257). Following this trend, this paper1 focuses on translators’ needs regarding terminology management and lookup during the different phases of translation tasks, with special reference to some of the main advantages that the combination of corpora and e-resources bring to translation. It also provides an overview of the different types of e-resources that allow access to comparable or parallel corpora in different ways. These e-resources usually employ the Web as Corpus (WaC) (De Schryver 2002), i.e., the web as an unlimited untagged corpus where to consult users’ queries about terms or expressions by means of concordance searches. These resources are fairly useful, since they provide users with relevant information about what they are looking for and help them understand some specific information or find tips about how to write or translate something. However, the information offered by these resources is not always reliable, since it is usually the outcome of automatic searches on the Internet, and users are usually not given information about the sources or do not know how to filter that information to select the correct one. Thus, there is a pressing need to conduct terminology research and implement tools specifically addressed at translators. The last part of the paper surveys present-day corpus-based e-resources and provides a tentative classification.