Open Access

Laura Giacomini, Paolo DiMuccio-Failla, Patrizio De Martin Pinter

• This paper focuses on the treatment of culture bound lexical items in a novel type of online learner’s dictionary model, the Phrase Based Active Dictionary (PAD). A PAD has a strong phraseological orientation: each meaning of a word is exclusively defined in a typical phraseological context. After introducing the relevant theory of realia in translation studies, we develop a broader notion of culture specific lexical items which is more apt to serve the purposes of learner’s lexicography and thus to satisfy the needs of a larger and often undefined target group. We discuss the treatment of such words and expressions in common English learner’s dictionaries and then present various excerpts from PAD entries in English, German, and Italian which display different strategies for coping with cultural contents in the lexicon. Our aim is to demonstrate that the phraseological approach at the core of the PAD model turns out to be extremely important to convey cultural knowledge in a suitable way for users to fully grasp cultural implications in language.