Web and Corpora for language professionals: Where are we (going)?

Adopting the perspective of translators and translation teachers and learners, the paper explores similarities and differences between the Web as it is currently accessible and traditional corpora. It presents a toolkit that has been created to help students and teachers at the School for Translators and Interpreters of the University of Bologna at Forlì assemble specialised "quick and dirty" Web corpora for specific translation/documentation tasks. Based on discussion and exemplification of this tool (the BootCaT toolkit), the paper suggests that in the long run it would be crucial to also provide linguists and language professionals with mega-corpora/mini-Webs, i.e. repositories of texts larger than ever, annotated and searchable as traditional corpora. The article concludes with a brief report on a project that aims to produce such resources for several languages (the WaCky project).