Despite its limitations, the bilingual dictionary remains students’ favourite tool when confronted with a translation task into their mother tongue. They refer to it mostly to understand a word or an expression, to check its meaning and to find an adequate equivalent, however, they do not always take full advantage of the different microstructural elements, such as usage examples. While the semantic, grammatical or stylistic functions of the example are well-known, their translational functions are still rarely valued and acknowledged. Yet they have proven very useful to novice translators. In this article, I shall analyse examples taken from three German-French bilingual dictionaries. The analysis is based on the divergences between the lexicographical examples and their translations. The aim was to investigate which type of example turns out to be the most useful to novice translators. To reach this objective, I pursue two main lines of reflection. On the one hand, I seek to identify the contrastive linguistic issues raised by the lexicographical examples and their translations, and to determine which solutions the dictionaries offered to the users. On the other hand, as a bilingual dictionary’s usefulness is directly related to the quality of the translations provided, I examine certain questionable translations in order to suggest possible ways to improve dictionaries intended for novice translators.