Idioms in Icelandic-French bilingual dictionary

Abstract

Idioms enrich people’s language, both written and spoken, and often reflect the culture of the linguistic community. However, their opaque meaning and fixed structure can make them difficult for foreign speakers to understand or use. It is therefore important that they are present in bilingual dictionaries which are intended to help some users to translate and/or understand texts in a foreign language (L2>L1), and other users to express themselves in a foreign language (L1>L2). This article focuses on idioms in a bilingual context, particularly regarding their presentation in a new Icelandic-French online dictionary, Lexía. The article discusses the methodology of the editorial team in comparing both the semantic and functional properties of idioms in Icelandic and French, with the aim of finding functionally adequate equivalents of the Icelandic idioms in the target language, French.