Applied extensions such as translation aids, translation quality assessment, and translator training are not addressed by Descriptive Translation Studies, which assumes that 'bridging rule' specific to applied fields will supply the transition between theory and practice. However, contrastive analysis and corpus linguistics, although promising, have not successfully bridged the gap between theory and practice to meet the needs of working professionals. Her it is argued that the concept of applied extension should be refined in light of usefulness an usability. The paper shows how useful and usable date can be generated by relying on empirical, identifiable corpus-based data and by making examples directional. It also introduces the idea of anchor phenomena - grammatical resources that are perceived as being cross-linguistically equivalent but that tend to and/or do convey partially divergent meanings. The anchor-phenomena data can then be conceptualized for use in applied tasks such as assessment tools for evaluating translation quality.