Using the web as a source of LSP corpora in the terminology classroom

Corpus-based terminology can be described as a working method which consists in exploring a domain-specific corpus in order to investigate terminological issues (Gamper and Stock 1998). Even though its theoretical grounds are similar to those on which corpus-based lexicography is founded, it has taken longer for corpus-based terminology to become an established procedure; this is probably due to the different nature of the corpora involved, which are large and general – and therefore easily reusable – in the former case, domain-specific and smaller – i.e., difficult to re-use – in the latter. Terminologists and translators usually need to build a new corpus every time they embark on a new task, and the consequent reduced cost-effectiveness has often been adduced as the main argument against the construction of“disposable” (as defined in Varantola 2003) corpora, especially in relation to those domains in which most reference material used to be available only on paper, thus requiring manual checking or scanning. Today, however, the increased availability of texts in electronic format enables to speed up the process of collecting and processing corpora to an extent which was unthinkable until not so long ago.