Translating collocations : an analysis of the resources available on and offline

In the last few years, more and more lexicographic reference tools have been appearing on the Internet with the result that an increasing number of students have been turning away from the more traditional paper and electronic dictionaries. In particular, the linguistic dif culties that collocations give rise to explain why Italian learners of English now often resort to sites such as Just-the-word.com, Phrases.net, Prowritingaid. com, Ozdic.com, Wordreference.com to translate word combinations into English. While there is no doubt that such tools are an important support for language encoding, their value and ef ciency must be ascertained, especially in view of the fact that they often come from unknown sources. The aim of the present work is to compare the treatment of collocations in online vs. traditional of ine tools, focussing in particular on three criteria: user-friendliness, the amount of word combinations available, and their quality.