The article compares the use of specialist dictionaries with the World Wide Web as a lexical resource. The authors drafted a questionnaire which was completed by 51 translators. It is concluded that of these 51 translators one never used specialised dictionaries, most them very often and a minority only rarely. Some respondents use specialised dictionaries more frequently than online resources, but more use them as or less frequently. The study demonstrates that paper resources have not yet been superseded by electronic resources and that translators show different preference patterns in their use of resource types.