As pointed out by BARRY (1991), computer terminology has become very popular in the last years thanks partly to the international expansion of the Internet. As a result, many computer terms have entered the general vocabulary in English and other languages. Two of the most widely spread words are hardware and software. Although several possible translations for them were proposed (AGUADO DE CEA 1986; ANINA 1992); the original English terms are nowadays the most commonly used in languages such as Spanish or Italian. Furthermore, many other words with -ware have been coined after hardware and software, for example bloatware, freeware, middleware, shareware, shelfware, etc. This article intends to analyse some of the problems in translating twenty English terms with -ware into four languages: Spanish, French, Italian and German. For this purpose, we comment on the different alternatives provided by the Eurodicautom for each one of these languages, comparing them with other possible translations proposed by complementary printed and on-line dictionaries and databases (NetGlos, Le Signet, etc)
