The Compilation of a Printed and Online Corpus-based Bilingual Collocations Dictionary

Abstract

Collocations are conventionalized, recurrent and arbitrary lexical combinations. Due to the fact that they are highly specific for a particular language and may be contextually restricted, collocations pose a problem to foreign language learners and translators with regard to production or encoding. Taking that into account, the compilation of monolingual and bilingual collocations dictionaries for both learners of English and Brazilian Portuguese as a foreign language and learner and professional translators is highly crucial and significant. The aim of this paper is to give an account of the compilation of a printed and online Corpus-based Bilingual Collocations Dictionary, in the English-Portuguese and Portuguese-English directions. The dictionary will focus on all types of collocations (verbal, nominal, adjectival and adverbial collocations), in order to help the referred audience use them more accurately and productively. The idea of having the proposed dictionary in online format will allow to incorporate more qualitatively and quantitatively collocational information. Furthermore, more examples can be included, different from conventional printed collocations dictionaries. Being the first bilingual collocations dictionary in the aforementioned directions, it is hoped to achieve the challenge of meeting learners' collocational needs as the collocations will be selected according to Brazilian learners' difficulties.