The article discusses a type of translation technology - an electronic corpus coupled with a corpus analysis tool. The article first provides some different definitions for 'corpus' and identifies three different types of corpora that seem to be particularly useful for translators: unilingual corpora, bi-/multilingual translation corpora, and bi-/multilingual comparable corpora. Then a categorization of a number of types of translation difficulties, including source text versus target text-related problems and encyclopaedic, linguistic, and textual problems is presented. The article concludes with an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses both of specially designed linguistic corpora and of the broader collections of text referred to as general corpora for meeting the needs of translators.