The treatment of phraseology in english-greek dictionaries

Resumen

Phraseological units are an important part of every language and due to their distinctive characteristics, they require special attention in their lexicographic description. However, phraseology is often underrepresented in lexicography, especially in bilingual dictionaries. Even though many important theoretical propositions have been suggested by linguists in the field of phraseology and idioms, from the perspective of lexicography, research is rather limited and concentrates mainly on monolingual lexicography. In our attempt to fill this gap, we have examined the treatment of phraseology in bilingual English-Greek dictionaries. Specifically, we proceeded to a corpus-based comparative analysis of the main English-Greek dictionaries (paper and electronic editions), in order to detect the problematic aspects in the description of phraseological units in terms of dictionary macrostructure and microstructure. Our attention focused on various issues, such as phraseological coverage, translation equivalents, grammatical and syntactic information, usage labels and more. In order to extract information about the use of phraseological units and to retrieve potential translation equivalents, we built a parallel English – Greek corpus, consisted of texts collected from TED talks. While parallel corpora have been widely used in several fields of linguistics, they have not been extensively exploited as a tool in bilingual lexicography. The results of the dictionary assessment have shown that even if the general quality of the examined dictionaries is rather high, they present various problems and omissions, such as poor phraseological inclusion, insufficient grammatical/syntactic or stylistic information, inadequate translation equivalents and so on. Based on the information retrieved from our parallel corpus we compiled for our study, we have proposed solutions for their improvement, which could be applied both in this language combination and in bilingual dictionaries in general. Our attempt aims to make a lexicographical proposal on how bilingual dictionaries would improve the representation of phraseology. This model could be used in the compilation of bilingual dictionaries of general use, as well as dictionaries of phraseology.