Clean, fix and give splendor ... but is not adapted

After more than three-and-pop iPhone, and just over two years through the advent of the App Store App Store-and all the subsequent wave of smartphones touch on other platforms such as Android, Windows Phone or BlackBerry and their respective application stores, "we still can have in our pockets Spanish Language Dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy, legal dictionary, in theory, we should use as reference the nearly 500 million Spanish speakers.

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

The iPhone, named in its first version, as best invention of 2007 by Time magazine, has reached 100 million units sold, according to what Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO, had the last 3 March at a press conference in San Francisco. Jobs also announced that his company had sold 15 million in the nine months iPads product life in 2010. In addition, from other figures provided by the American Visionary September 2010, another keynote, and are known to the press conference of the California-mark, it was estimated that the number of iPods sold touch was around 45 million. The three, known as "IOS devices' by the operating system they use, they feed on applications from the App Store, shop now has more than 350,000 applications and has provided U.S. $ 2,000 million of revenues from sales to developers platform.

Users of iPhone, iPod touch and iPad we have the other major monolingual dictionaries languages, or at least, smaller versions of these (as well as a variety of translation and bilingual dictionaries, and some more specific, such as medical or legal dictionaries). Thus, we see the term adaptation in the Oxford Dictionary of Inglés or in the New Oxford American Dictionary (dictionaries of this editorial are also available for the Android platform, BlackBerry, Symbian and Windows Phone), the French word in the dictionary Dixel adaptation of Le Robert or a Larousse, the German noun in a dictionary Langenscheidt Anpassung (editorial also present in many platforms, and Larousse) in the Novo Dicionário Adaptação Aurélio da Língua Portuguesa ...

To search for the word alignment in monolingual Spanish dictionary from the App Store, we go, almost obligatorily, the Great Dictionary of the Spanish Language Vox, adapted by the developer with an impeccable Ultralingua interface, or other dictionaries "cheesy" and author simple unknown, apart from other smaller Vox. However, it is not entirely true that we have in our pockets DRAE: There are several third party applications on the App Store that connect to the online dictionary for definitions. But this kind of applications that connect to online databases have two drawbacks: they rely on Internet access and waiting time performance of the query to the database is larger. While there is an official version of the dictionary, published in 2005, a platform aimed at mobile devices, it is equally true that such a platform is completely obsolete.

But what is really the reason why we can not easily and reliably viewe DRAE at nuetras phones? Do the developers of applications, such as that Ultralingua, have focused their attention in this dictionary? Given the wide range of dictionaries of other languages, it seems unlikely. Perhaps the SAR or Espasa (publisher of the dictionary) does not have licensed, or not-these have prompted developers to bring a dictionary to mobile platforms?

In any case, given the circumstances, we believe it is the duty of the Royal Spanish Academy to develop an edition of his dictionary for major smartphone platforms, mission also very expensive and would not be economically or take too long to complete. If, as Garcia de la Concha said when he announced in October, the completion of the new website of the SAR, the objective of the academy with the renewal of the web is to adapt the language to new technologies, we hope, the faithful fulfillment of this purpose, this project will also include understanding the institution's presence in our pockets, our smartphones.

This award is an article I wrote for a contest for newspaper opinion articles in high school.