The article discusses the role of semantic information in corpus-based lexicography and examines it as it pertains to the process of compiling a bilingual dictionary, both in the analysis stage, where lexicographers are seeking facts that are essential to the discovery and recording of how a word behaves, and in the synthesis stage, where lexicographers employ a wider variety of information in order to help guide dictionary users to the appropriate translations. It is suggested that the types of information used as 'sense indicators' in bilingual dictionaries reflect transfer conditions from source to target language. The authors present an initial classification for this type of lexicographically relevant information, which forms the basis of an online database of sense indicators, the Sense Indicator Database.