Terminología española or how to make better dictionaries for US Spanish speakers

If you are traveling to Spain or Mexico, but do not know the language, chances are that you will pick up a pocket English-Spanish dictionary at Half Price Books, Barnes & Noble or at your local library. Publishers like Collins, Merriam-Webster and Random House are well known. There are also bilingual phrasebooks. Pocket dictionaries are intended for casual users, naturally.

Students who are taking a language course will need a more robust solution, where the dictionary shows parts of speech and usage examples in practical situations. Again, major publishers have that need covered. Then you have more specialized dictionaries containing definitions and highly detailed notes on usage. Even large bilingual English-Spanish dictionaries, however, are general-purpose publications. In the United States, the focus is on bilingual glossaries or dictionaries, not monolingual ones. In the case of English, the United States markets are saturated with a vast array of proper English dictionaries. If you are a student of a foreign language, French, Spanish or German, you need a proper monolingual dictionary in that language. Most such dictionaries are imported, however. In essence, language students and tourists have their needs covered by the existing dictionaries. What about the local Spanish-speaking residents?

In the case of Spanish, it’s not a foreign language anymore, since more than 37 million speak it in America. And many more will speak it in the years to come. Why is it, then, that it is a language only visible to us when we hear it spoken or seen on cable TV telenovelas (soap operas)? Readers can avail themselves of the many Spanish newspapers, such as the El Diario La Prensa (New York) and El Nuevo Herald (Miami, FL), as well as weeklies and magazines. Books are also being published in Spanish in the United States, according to the Publishers Global website.

County-level map of Spanish language use in the United States in 2012

The Spanish language is being taught in schools, community colleges and universities. Bilingual workers and professionals —those using Spanish and English— are found across many industries. So, why am I still concerned for the lack of monolingual Spanish dictionaries being published natively in the United States? Although there are efforts to catalog, promote and/or describe specific Spanish uses, such as Ilán Stavans’ Spanglish and RIUSS‘ work on estadounidismos (Spanish words or expressions that take on new meaning in the United States), there are no lexicography projects involving Spanish in the United States that I know of.

At this point, I want to make a clarification: the numerous university translation certificate courses being taught have a terminology component, which is basically a list of domain-specific words, such as financial or medical terminology, along with the basics on how to build bilingual or multilingual glossaries. But this area of terminology is not lexicography, which is the craft and discipline of dictionary making.

Dr. Francisco Marcos-Marín, a professor of linguistics and advisor to RIUSS, has written a brief report on Spanish lexicography. Spanish lexicography is also the focus of a master’s program sponsored jointly by Universidad de León (Spain) and the Real Academia Española. Sadly, candidates to this unique graduate program on Spanish lexicography cannot be citizens of the United States, Equatorial Guinea, Philippines or Spain. Yet it is precisely here, in America, where Spanish lexicography is most needed at this time.

The two examples cited, Spanglish and the RIUSS projects, are isolated projects that pursue very different approaches. On one hand, Spanglish reflects a lingua franca for some Spanish speakers (there are examples of an incipient Spanglish literature), but Spanglish is not Spanish and it is not useful for communicating with other Spanish-speaking populations or nations. On the other hand, RIUSS has for objectives the study and promotion of formal Spanish usage and plain Spanish language in health care and similar public services. These projects might use word lists and glossaries to achieve their purposes, but their objective is not lexicography per se.

Why would Spanish lexicography be necessary or desirable in America? I can envision a few reasons:

1. Promotion of Spanish as another language (not a foreign language) in use in the United States beyond translation and imported literature
2. Creation and publication of US Spanish dictionaries
3. Complementary and solid research beyond the politics of statistics
4. Stronger and more effective visibility of United States Spanish usage in written and spoken form

Spanish speakers and other users of this language already have dictionaries published by the Real Academia Española, but this is not enough to foster and cement their linguistic ans sociocultural identity. Think tanks like the Pew Research Center, political parties and cultural observers may talk about Spanish and Spanish speakers in the United States but this is not enough. I hope to start a conversation.

 

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