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Says Santiago Muñoz Machado like Borges imagined a universal library, he dreams of a book full of windows through which one can reach the information about any problem that arises. A great dictionary within the reach of all, with all human knowledge. By now you are no more than ramblings worthy of science fiction, but the director of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) makes it possible to materialize that image. Your last step in this direction is the Dictionary panhispánico of the Spanish legal (DPEJ), a project mastodóntico that he himself has co-ordinated and in which have participated a total of four hundred and fifty specialists for six years, and brings together in a single web page the legal language that we use Spanish speakers to the two sides of the puddle: more than forty thousand entries to harmonize a single language.
“I think that is the most important work Spain has in hands right now from the cultural point of view. The most important thing. What institution is doing such a thing?”, he commented, proud, Muñoz Machado to ABC prior to the filing of the DPEJ. Three years ago, published the Spanish version and in a paper of this work: it was the first time in its history that the Academy rushing the creation of a specialist dictionary, which is now enlarged by welcoming the words of America and is enriched with the digital format. “We had to start from the right because it is the discipline that has most influenced the formation of the Spanish (…) This will result in companies when they invest in America will be able to have more legal certainty in what they do, the citizens will have better guarantees of their rights, and the lawmakers will have regulatory standards at their disposal, which will allow to harmonize a bit what policies we make and how we regulate”, he added. In short: a tool for experts and laymen, all of them touched, like it or not, by the law.
During the presentation, Muñoz Machado, who spoke with Carlos Lesmes , president of the Supreme Court and the General Council of the Judiciary, explained the functioning of the DPEJ. Its greatest virtue, he said, are the hyperlinks to the legal systems. Each entry in the dictionary has a definition, a usage example and, behold, the novelty, links to legal texts of the different countries of the hispanic american community where it uses the term in question. The act, by the way, also counted with the intervention, among others, the president of the Government of Spain, Pedro Sanchez , who stressed the rapidity of the institution to develop a work as “monumental”, and the vice president Carmen Calvo , which celebrated the utility of this dictionary for the “maintenance of the rule of Law.”
With the DPEJ starts a stage in the SAR is dedicated to the specialized dictionaries . Today the Dictionary embraces some ninety-three thousand words, but the experts in the field of lexicon say that we have over two hundred thousand in our language. “The Dictionary has been left out of all that, but now with digital media can recover. There is a need for integrating a dictionary with others, making it a great tool for you to understand everything,” said Muñoz Machado. What was said: a dream that before it sounded like science fiction, but that is now closer to becoming a reality.
