Cleans, fixes and gives splendor ... but does not adapt

After more than three and a half years since the iPhone exploded, and a little more than two and a half years after the appearance of its App Store application store - and with all this the subsequent wave of touch smartphones from other platforms such as Android, Windows Phone or BlackBerry and their respective app stores—, we still cannot have in our pockets of the Spanish dictionary full Royal Spanish Academy, normative dictionary that, in theory, we should use as a reference the almost 500 million Spanish speakers.

It is clear that the iPhone and smartphones have penetrated deep into the developed world, concentrating, in our pockets, the Internet and social networks such as Twitter or Facebook, email, newspapers and magazines from around the globe, dictionaries, music, movies, books, useful applications, video games, GPS navigation, 3G modems for our computers ...

El iPhone, named, in its first version, as the best invention of the year 2007 by Time magazine, has reached the number of 100 million units sold, according to what Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, told on March 3 at a press conference in San Francisco. Jobs also announced that his company had sold 15 million iPads in the nine months of the product's life in 2010. In addition, based on other figures provided by the American visionary in September 2010, in another of the keynotes —this is how the press conferences of the Californian brand are known—, it was estimated that the amount of ipod touch sold was around 45 million. All three, known as 'iOS devices' because of the operating system they use, are powered by applications from the App Store, a store that already has more than 350.000 applications and what has provided 2.000 million of sales revenue to platform developers.

IPhone, iPod touch and iPad users we can have the main monolingual dictionaries of others languages, or, at least, minor versions of these (as well as a variety of translation or bilingual dictionaries, and even some more specific ones, such as medical or legal dictionaries). Thus, we can consult the term adaptation in the Oxford Dictionary of English or New Oxford American Dictionary (dictionaries from this publisher are also available for Android, BlackBerry, Symbian and Windows Phone platforms); the french word adaptation in the dictionary dixel de Le robert or a Larousse; the german noun Adaptation in a dictionary langenscheidt (publisher also present on various platforms, as well as Larousse);  adapted in the New Dictionary Aurélio of the Portuguese Language...

To search for the word adaptation In a monolingual Spanish dictionary from the App Store, we must go, almost obligatorily, to the Great Vox Dictionary of the Spanish Language, adapted by the developer Ultralingua with an impeccable interface, or to other "crappy" and simple dictionaries of unknown author, apart from another smaller Vox. However, it is not entirely true that we cannot have the DRAE in our pockets: there are several third-party apps in the App Store that connect to the online dictionary to get the definitions. But these types of applications that connect to online databases have two drawbacks: that they depend on the Internet connection and that the waiting time for querying the database is longer. While it is true that there is an official version of the dictionary, published in 2005, for a platform oriented to mobile devices, it is equally true that such a platform is totally obsolete.

But what is really the reason why we cannot easily consult the DRAE on our phones? Is it that application developers, such as the aforementioned Ultralingua, have not fixed their attention on this dictionary? In view of the wide variety of dictionaries for other languages, it seems unlikely. Perhaps the RAE or Espasa (publisher that publishes the dictionary) have not granted a license - or have not encouraged - these developers to bring the dictionary to mobile platforms?

In any event, under the circumstances, we believe it is must of the Royal Spanish Academy develop an edition of your dictionary for the main platforms of smartphones, a mission that, in addition, would not be very expensive financially, nor would it take a long time to complete. Yes, as García de la Concha declared when he announced, in October, the completion of the new RAE website, the objective of the academy with the renewal of the website is to adapt the language to new technologies, we hope, for the faithful fulfillment of this purpose, that this project also includes the inclusion of the institution's presence in our pockets, on our smartphones.

This is an award-winning article I wrote for an opinion piece contest at the institute.