Open Access

Carolina Flinz

• Tourlex is a specialized bilingual online dictionary under construction hosted at the University of Mannheim with a particular focus on collocations and multi-word units. The languages included are German and Italian, but because of the need for online dictionaries of tourism language (Flinz 2015: 56) the framework is open to the inclusion of other languages. Tourlex is a corpus-based dictionary, i.e. the primary sources will be corpora, in particular a proper bilingual comparable corpus analysed with the tools Sketch Engine and Lexpan, and the freely accessible corpus DeReKo. The aim of this paper is to give an overview of the main actions (already done but also in planning), according to the phases of the lexicographical process of a dictionary under construction. The description of each phase will be enriched by examples taken from the project, showing also how the decisions taken to satisfy the needs of the user, the Italian learner of German as a foreign language, had influenced the microstructure of the entries. We conclude with a final reflection on the data, facts, and ongoing problems.