When trying to translate a specific text on football from Spanish into Brazilian Portuguese or vice versa, the translator is faced with a myriad of footbal-specific terms which are not found in most dictionaries or glossaries, or which are found in a limited way, leaving out many real use situations. In the course of this study, a bilingual and bi-directional glossary was built with the most commonly used football terms in written communication in the Spanish-Portuguese language pair, . My initial assumption was that Corpus Linguistics would provide the necessary means for such a task. Corpus Linguistics enables one to study a language or a language variety using a computer, retrieving empirical evidence found in a corpus, which is defined as a set of texts, compiled according to predefined criteria, in electronic format. This dissertation is divided into five parts. In the introduction, some historical aspects of Portuguese and Spanish are discussed, as well as the influence of football in our society, the problems found in dictionaries and glossaries, and the potential of football news retrieved from the Internet as a basis for building the glossary proposed. In the second part, I argue that Corpus Linguistics is an approach and a method of research, and present the different types of corpora. Then, the question of equivalence in translation is briefly addressed, the content of our corpus of study is explained, as well as the steps adopted to identify the terms and their translation equivalents, through the comparison of football news from Brazil, Spain and Argentina, and by means of the extraction and observation of keywords, with the aid of specific electronic tools. In the third part, I discuss the terminology issues implicated in this study, especially with reference to the decisions taken for the macro- and microstructure of the glossary. In the fourth part, I propose a form of presenting the glossary to the user and provide a sample of entries. In the fifth and last part, I make the final considerations, in which I conclude that Corpus Linguistics, as an approach and a methodology, proved to be effective for the construction of the targeted bilingual glossary, since exploring the specialized corpora made it possible to properly identify the main football terms used in written communication in Brazilian, Spanish and Argentine journalism and their translation equivalents. The result is a bilingual work of reference in the field of football, which contains nearly four thousand entries, all of them with authentic examples of usage.
