The importance of a good dictionary (or not)...

In this post I want to talk about the importance of a good dictionary. 

Whenever my students have to write an essay I tell them to use a good dictionary to look up for the words they don't know in the foreign language.

 Some of them follow my advice, but some other can't resist the temptation annnnnd they end up using some free translation tools on line(always a badddd badddd choice, guys).

Well, today I want to give you to explain my reasoning with an example.

Have you heard of Superbritánico? 

It is a Spanish company (very popular among teachers of English in Spain) which takes advantage of literal translations (commonly a result of the aforementioned tools) and use them to create the cutest designs. 

Let me show you an example:

Obviously, this weird translation does not work well in the target language (that is, English). However, any Spanish speaker would immediately recognise this idiom (and have a laugh). 

But, my students are clever (yep) and they would look up this idiom in the dictionary (right?) and they would find out that:

(source of the picture:http://es.languagebookings.com/cursos-espanol/espana/malaga/comments/stim-spanish-teachers-in-malaga.html)