Following on from a post I wrote on some of my favourite Spanish-English dictionaries, I recently discovered that the “Diccionario politécnico de las lenguas española e inglesa” is now online.

This Spanish-English technical dictionary by Federico Beigbeder Atienza was updated in December 2012 and published in an online format only. There are now more than 500,000 entries and new terminology will be added every year.

Online at a fraction of the price

The publishers (Ediciones Diaz de Santos, S.A.) offer several different options for purchasing a subscription, such as a one-year single-user licence for €20 or a licence with a search limit of 1000 terms over a two-year period for €30. As you probably know, the print volumes used to cost some €150 a piece, so the online version makes a lot of sense.

Features

I’ve been testing the free one-week demo. I like the orange layout, reminiscent of the deprecated paper version. There’s a useful list of recent searches, which seems to be set to limit of 15, and you can also mark a term search as a “favourite” (although I prefer to enter it in my termbase if I think I’m going to use it again).

In addition to a strict alphabetical order search, you can enable a term search within  definitions, so if you enter “barrido”, then “exploración por barrido” will appear in the list. There isn’t a fuzzy search option or any wildcard search feature.

While entries aren’t hyperlinked (cross-references would have been a great feature), the search results do link to external sites, including DRAE for Spanish terms. It’s pity that a link to the Collins or Oxford online dictionaries isn’t included for English terms.

You can easily reverse the language direction.

I think this new online resource is great news for technical translators and medical translators who work with medical devices. I’ve bought the two-year licence with a limit of 1000 term searches, to see how it goes. And my dog-eared paper version will be retired at last and put to use as a flower press.