La dimension interculturelle dans les dictionnaires bilingues italien-français

Our thesis aims at exploring the intercultural dimension of Italian-French bilingual dictionaries. The first part represents a theoretical approach to the issue. A definition of the concepts of culture and cross-cultural precedes a study of the relationships between languages and cultures. After that, we have dealt with the following themes : the epistemological status of bilingual lexicography and its relationships with linguistics; the semantic hindrances to equivalence; the peculiarity of translation in bilingual lexicography; the contributions of semantics to lexicography. Special attention is also given to the concepts of semantic, referential and cultural gaps and to the lexical gaps in general. In the last two chapters, the focus shifts to connotation and to some approaches that stress the importance of cultural values in language (keywords, mots à charge culturelle partagée, cultural scripts, the depth dimension of language). The second part of our thesis is a corpus-based study on letter A of four Italian-French contemporary dictionaries (Boch, Garzanti, Hachette-Paravia, Larousse). We have tried, in particular, to emphasize the role and the typology of the gaps occurring in the equivalence, especially of cultural gaps. Then, we focus on culture-bound examples, which show the importance of stereotypes and shared points of view in conveying the meaning of the utterances. Finally, we deal with cultural notes and some false borrowings in Italian, in order to illustrate other aspects of equivalence.