ABSTRACT
Our bilingual lexicography has not been indifferent to the impulse and also the uncertainty experienced by (meta)lexicography already in the last decades of the past century and the first years of this millennium. Technological developments represented a leap in quality for the creation and publication of dictionaries. But these same developments have progressively pushed into the background the already controversial role of the bilingual dictionary as a tool for accessing data on the lexicon of different languages.
Within the framework of the current crisis in the publishing world, bilingual lexicography has been particularly affected because of its undeniable reliance on private companies. Indeed, the necessary transformations in the landscape of the publishing arena have slowed down the evolution of modern bilingual lexicography, but they have not managed to stop the metalexicographical production or the creation of new models and new dictionaries. This is particularly revealed by the studies and practices that promote the educational value of dictionaries.
From these perspectives, we approach the formal study of the most representative bilingual dictionaries with Spanish as one of its languages published after the year 2000—in some cases, new editions of previous works that have been significantly renewed. We focus on the following aspects: (1) External but determinant aspects, such as the size and essential components of the dictionaries—both the outer texts and the different macrostructures. (2) Forms of expression, either linguistic or otherwise, such as the condensation procedures and the value of typography and colors. (3) The informative program at a macrostructural, intermediate and microstructural level, including the updating of the index of entries, the informative program of the articles, and the presence of examples and orientation of the dictionaries to specific uses and users, such as language learners or translators.
The proposals for forthcoming lines of work derived from this analytical study suggest a more advanced automatization of some search processes, with greater text-dictionary interaction, but at the same time they maintain the essence of the bilingual dictionary as a tool that grants access to reliable lexical data, and as an indispensable educational tool.
