Multi-word verbs in French-English online bilingual dictionaries : the contribution of corpora

As rightly pointed out by Granger (2012), in the 21st century, “lexicography is at a turning-point in its history” and has to deal with several new challenges when moving to the electronic medium. Although the phraseological coverage of dictionaries has considerably improved in recent times, it is of common knowledge that some developments still have to be done in the field of bilingual lexicography. In the light of these observations, the present work aims at investigating the treatment of multi-word verbs in the currently increasingly used French-English online bilingual dictionaries in terms of coverage, accessibility and display of the entries, followed by an in-depth analysis of the translation equivalents suggested by the dictionaries against corpus data. Outcomes of this case study revealed issues in the treatment and translations of the surveyed multi-word verbs and demonstrated the role of bilingual corpora to significantly enhance the accuracy and diversity of the translation equivalents suggested in the online bilingual dictionaries.