This paper presents an experiment which was carried out at the University of Bologna in Forlì with translation students in the context of a course on computer assisted tools. Students were given a text to translate and asked to search the Internet, select suitable web pages in the target language, and download them on disk. In this way, while undertaking the translation and adding material to the corpus as the translation proceeded, they were able to familiarize themselves with the topic of the translation at hand, to select texts according to text type, to assess the reliability of text sources and evaluate the target readership. These DIY corpora were then browsed switching between a full text mode (using an Internet browser) and a concordancing mode (using WordSmith Tools). Finally, students were asked to submit a brief report on the usefulness of these tools.