Collocazioni nella lessicografia bilingue (italiano-tedesco): i dizionari sono realmente user-friendly?

This article deals with the user-friendliness of bilingual (Italian-German) dictionaries. It focuses more specifically on the use of dictionaries by Italian-speaking learners of German and presents two tests which consist in the translation of sentences with collocations into German (test 1) and into Italian (test 2). These tests allow, on the one hand, to understand users’ skills, their expectations and problems when consulting the dictionary and, on the other hand, they highlight some of the dictionary’s limitations, thus allowing a metalexicographical analysis. Dictionary usage research and dictionary critique can contribute to the constant improvement of dictionaries, making them more user-friendly and more accurate in their presentation, because it is only by observing the “user-in-actu” (Wiegand 1998: 501) that weaknesses and ambiguities in the dictionaries can be discovered.