Text corpora and bilingual phraseography

The article discusses issues in the compilation of bilingual dictionaries of idioms based on an analysis of corpus data. The advantages of using corpora consist not only in more detailed and well thought-out illustrations of the expressions being described, but also in the additional possibilities that the corpus materials provide for compiling the idiom list and structuring entries. The relevant principles are illustrated by data taken from a new German-Russian dictionary of idioms that is being constructed by an international team of linguists and lexicographers. Fragments of this dictionary are available on the website of the German Language Institute in Mannheim: “Deutsch-russische Idiome online“ http://wvonline.ids-mannheim.de/idiome_russ/index.htm. Relevant information is also made available via the Europhras homepage on the website http://www.europhras.org. All examples of idiom usage in this dictionary are taken from the text corpora DeReKo (Das Deutsche Referenzkorpus) and DWDS (Korpora des Digitalen Wörterbuchs der deutschen Sprache des 20. Jahrhunderts), and in individual cases from the German-language Internet. Parallel German-Russian texts from the Russian National Corpus (RNC) are also used.