The present paper revolves around MaxiECPC, one of the various sub-corpora that make up ECPC (the European Comparable and Parallel Corpora), an electronic archive of speeches delivered at different parliaments (i.e. the European Parliament-EP; the Spanish Congreso de los Diputados-CD; and the British House of Commons-HC) from 1996 to 2009. In particular MaxiECPC comprises speeches from 1996 to 2003 with a total of 53,691,918 words. After a brief theoretical overview corpus linguistics (CL) and Translation Studies (TS), the overall methodological approach of ECPC research group (drawing on Tognini-Bonelli 2001, Sinclair 2003, and Scott & Tribble 2006) is described and implemented in its first steps, including a description of general statistics, frequency words, and keywords. Further research will complement the partial application of the methodology briefly sketched here.