The aim of this paper is to give an idea of the latest results in the field of Computations Linguistics which are of direct interest to both translation studies and the work of the translator. The focus is on recent developments in the areas of computational lexicography and corpus linguistics, i.e. on the creations of electronic lexicons and language reference corpora and the design and implementation of procedures to analyse and query them. Furthermore, the article concentrates on the construction of bilingual and multilingual reference corpora, and the implications for both theoretical studies and practical applications. The authors describe their bilingual text management system, which can be used to help process and analyse different types of texts and extract useful cross-linguistic data. This system is one of the two main components of the prototype Translators’ Workstation, which has been implemented at the Istituto di linguistica Computazionale (ILC-CNR).