The Development Of A Multilingual Collocation Dictionary

In this paper we discuss the development of a multilingual collocation dictionary for translation purposes. By ‘collocation’ we mean not only set or fixed expressions including idioms, simple cooccurrences of items and metaphorical uses, but also translators’ paraphrases. We approach this problem from two directions. Firstly we identify certain linguistic phenomena and lexicographical requirements that need to be respected in the development of such dictionaries. The second and other direction concerns the development of such dictionaries in which linguistic phenomena and lexicographic attributes are themselves a means of access to the collocations. The linguistic phenomena and lexicographical requirements concern variously placing the sense of collocations rather than headwords or other access methods at the centre of interest, together with collocation synonymy and translation equivalence, polysemy and non-reversibility of the lexis, and other more lexicographic properties such as varieties of language and regionalisms, and types of translation.