Electronic resources and lexical cohesion in the construction of intercultural competence 1 Clara Inés López Rodríguez University of Granada (Spain) Cultural competence is one of the five components of translation competence (Nord 1991: 146). The term culture encompasses not only the products of a society as embodied in its institutions and objects, but also world views, experiences and behaviour schemata. Since the comprehension and reformulation of culture as product is one of the most difficult tasks in translation, numerous strategies for the translation of cultural references have been proposed (Ballester in press; Mayoral and Muñoz 1997; Nedergaard-Larsen 1993). In this paper, we assume that comparable corpora on current affairs in English and Spanish contribute to the terminological and documentation tasks involved in translation, while increasing students' encyclopaedic knowledge and intercultural competence. A better understanding and management of cultural references are also achieved through the analysis of lexical cohesion in texts. As a result, we believe that the translation classroom offers the opportunity to activate both reading strategies based on the notion of lexical chain (López Rodríguez 2001) and documentation strategies involving the exploitation of electronic resources. 1. Introduction The study of international communication across cultures has attracted the attention of many scholars since the late 1980s. For instance, it was in the late 1980s that a new subject known as British Studies or British Cultural Studies began to appear in different countries. At that time, cognitive anthropologists such as Holland and Quinn (1987) argued that culture should be understood in a broad sense, in other words, as “shared knowledge not only of a people´s customs and artefacts and oral traditions but also of what individuals must know in order to behave as a functioning member of their society”. In the field of Translation, Snell-Hornby (1988: 40) defined translation as a cross-cultural event and culture as “a totality of knowledge, proficiency and perception”. She recognized “its immediate connection with behavior (or action) and events and its dependence on norms, whether those of social behavior or those accepted in language usage”. Her approach derives from Hönig, Kussmaul, Reiss and Vermeer (apud Snell-Hornby 1988: 40). The relation between culture and translation is also obvious in Nord (1991), who considered cultural competence as one of the five components of translation competence, the others being linguistic competence in the native language (L1) and in the foreign language (L2), transfer competence, factual competence in sometimes highly specialised fields and technical competence for documentation. 1 This research was carried out within the framework of ONCOTERM (PB98-1342), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education. This is the final peer‐reviewed version of the following article: López Rodríguez, Clara Inés. ʹͲͲ͵. Electronic resources and lexical cohesion in the construction of intercultural competence. Lebende Sprachen Ͷ8, no. Ͷ/ʹͲͲ͵: ͳͷʹ‐ͳͷ͸. <http://www.lebendesprachen.de> You can find more articles authored by LexiCon Research Group members at <http://lexicon.ugr.es>.