Idioms Dictionaries: Italian and English

Translating implies, primarily, a comparison between two linguistic systems: by analyzing how a language works compared with another, a translator tries to keep to the syntactic, lexical and pragmatic components of the original language by selecting the most suitable words, constructions and stylistic nuances in the L2. His main concern is never to violate the spirit of either system. All this taken into account, a translation work cannot be seen as an automatic operation anymore; what was considered in the past as a straightforward task is actually a hard one, causing more than one problem: from the meaning of a sentence to the transference of subjective, emotional values which fill the speech with different shades of meaning. In all the works which have been carried out so far in the attempt to establish the theoretical bases of translation, metaphors and idiomatic expressions have almost been neglected, despite the delicate place they both occupy in the semantic component. Our opinion is that only a contrastive work can point out all the problems related to them. Following this approach we have begun a comparison between English and Italian idiomatic expressions on formal, lexical and semantic levels, thus tracing the points of similarities and differences between the two languages. Bilingual dictionaries and dictionaries of idioms have been the main sources for our data. The results would provide useful and easy-to-process material, available to all those who work and research in the language field