1. A computer-implemented method of improving performance of a generic text-search engine by use of a search-controller to provide cross-lingual searching in a computer implemented search of a corpus of documents, the method comprising: a. operating at the search-controller level to mediate between a request function and an underlying generic text-search system and electronically receiving a query containing a set of user-supplied search terms in a source language from the request function; b. submitting the set of user-supplied search terms in the source language to the underlying search engine for matching against the terms found in a set of predetermined source-language fields included in the corpus documents, the source-language fields being determined as a function of having a set of values in the source-language that are relatively short and keyword-rich in comparison to other fields in the corpus of documents and returning a set of responsive documents based on the matching; c. statistically analyzing the terms found in a set of predetermined target-language fields included in the responsive documents obtained in step (b), the target-language fields having been determined as a function of a set of values in the target language that are relatively short and keyword-rich in comparison to other fields in the corpus of documents; and d. generating a set of suggested search terms in the target language based on the term frequencies computed in the statistical analysis of the set of values in the target-language fields performed in step (c), the generating being further a function of comparing the term frequencies from the target-language fields of the responsive documents against the frequencies of the same terms in the same-target language fields in the corpus of documents as a whole, wherein a user may request additional suggested search terms by iteratively invoking the term-suggestion process and selecting/de-selecting from a set of returned items as seeds for solicitation of further search-term suggestions, and wherein the iterative rounds of suggestions, each being presented in its own panel of scored suggested search-term items, result in a cascade of suggestion panels.