The bilingual dictionary: Friend or foe?

Bilingual dictionaries are widely used by language learners of all proficiency levels. However, this kind of dictionary presents several problems: both SL and TL items are not sufficiently covered, there are many clashes at the semantic, syntactic, combinatorial and pragmatic levels, data on frequency or linguistic and situational restrictions are systematically omitted, and access to the dictionary can be difficult and time-consuming. In this paper I will focus on dictionary use.