ABSTRACT
This paper discusses the potential of a bilingual reference corpus as a translation resource. Such a corpus consists of sets of texts from pairs of languages that treat a given domain and can be contrasted because of their common features. This type of resource is useful because (a) it can provide translation equivalents and (b) it can allow for the identification of natural language lexical equivalents. The authors present procedures that have been developed at the Istituto di Linguistica Com.putaziona.le, Pisa, to construct and query bilingual reference corpora and to extract significant data for translation purposes and contrastive textual studies. The discussion is supported by examples of the different types of results that can be obtained.
