COLLINS BILINGUAL DICTIONARIES

 Bilingual dictionaries can be compared to unfaithful lovers.  Even after we forgive their trespasses, we can never trust them again. Once we detect flaws in the equivalencies given in either language, we will suspect the rest of the information given by a dictionary. This loss of trust is bad. Unfortunately, it is in the nature of parallel lexicography that dictionaries are interlarded with flaws and sometimes downright mistakes. 

One thing is to give equivalents of physical objects: Tree/árbol/Baum/ arbre. Or Tisch/table/mesa/ table/ taula... and another to translate -not paraphrase- idiomatic expressions. And it is here when we must come to a halt. We have encountered a horse of a different color.

I already wanted language students -we are all language students- about the pitfalls they will encounter when checking equivalencies in Word Reference.  I wish to add COLLINS dictionaries to the lot and warn users against trusting it as a dependable source of bilingual information. So, what to do? Never use one single dictionary. Check and double-check various workbooks because you will never know. I could give examples, but they are so many you can detect them yourself.