Enriching the phraseological coverage of high-frequency adverbs in English-French bilingual dictionaries

As pointed out by Stig Johansson (2007), one of the most obvious applications of cross-linguistic corpus research is in bilingual lexicography. The treatment of phraseological units in bilingual dictionaries, however, still lags far behind that in monolingual dictionaries. We compare the coverage of one category of phraseological units, namely ‘lexical bundles’ (Biber et al. 1999), in English-French bilingual dictionaries with their patterns of usage in various corpora. A detailed study of two high-frequency adverbs, encore in French and yet in English, shows that the use of monolingual and translation corpus data can help improve the number of lexical bundles included in the bilingual dictionary entry, the number and accuracy of translation equivalents, and the prototypicality and authenticity of the examples. Using corpora also makes it possible to avoid categorial bias in translations.