Photo: Marta Jara

Paz Battaner is a lexicographer and emeritus professor of Spanish Language. She was dean of the Faculty of Translation and Interpretation at UPF between 1993 and 1998 and the University ombuds officer from 2008 to 2015. Since that same year, she has sat in chair “s” of the Real Academia Española. With her, 11 women have now held this position in the 300 years of the history of the institution.

Last January she took possession of the chair with a speech entitled “Some bottomless pits of dictionaries”, dedicated to abstract nouns.

- How have you lived your appointment to chair “s” of the RAE?

With surprise, I was not expecting it; with a great deal of emotion, because in our culture the Real Academia Española is an old institution that has contributed to the unity of the Spanish language and I have been and I consider myself primarily a Spanish language teacher. I’ve lived it with appreciation to the academics who put my name forward at the plenary; and I am now living it with enthusiasm because I’m really happy still to be active; and finally I am in a position of readiness to contribute all I have learned throughout my long life, twenty-five years of which at UPF, to the new dictionary of the RAE.

- Could we say that it puts the icing on the cake of your career?

If you will talk about life as a cake, yes; if you talk about life as a path, -that means career-, it could be like getting to a mountain refuge where you can get replenishment to finish and reach the summit; if you want to talk about life “como los ríos que van a dar a la mar, que es el morir” (our lives are the rivers that flow into the sea of death), we could say that it’s like reaching the estuary. I prefer savoury to sweet.

- Your speech of accession was entitled “Some bottomless pits of dictionaries”. Should we be worried? What are these bottomless pits?

Firstly, the ‘bottomless pits’ of my speech are highly suggestive words that we need daily. They are words like the ones I recalled previously, surprise, emotion, appreciation, enthusiasm, readiness, abstract nouns in the old grammars, which require new treatment in dictionaries because they vary with time and adjust subtly to different contexts. We needn’t worry at all; we need to know that they help us to express ourselves, that they belong to “the sphere of reality that is invented by words” to cite the poet José Ángel Valente, that they are hard to describe well and are not exhausted in the explanations given in the dictionaries.

- How has the world of dictionaries changed with digitization? Have they managed to adapt to the new times?

Computing represents a new work technique for the description of the lexicon of languages and for their presentation. Linguistic corpora are warehouses of forms that provide information about the social use of language; before it was the job of lexicographers and a few citations on which the description was made; now we have a lot of data to describe words with their semantic value and with their grammatical requirements. You don’t need alphabetical order, neither to write the dictionary nor to present them. Students know the dictionaries that are available on the web and use them all the time.

- To what will you devote yourself as a member of the RAE? What are the main challenges you face?

I will dedicate myself to the new dictionary that the Academy is planning; there is a lot of work to do. The Spanish language is one of the most widespread in the world, to keep it together respecting the various forms it takes in each country and in each region is a challenge. Work is now done jointly among the twenty-two American language academies. More is written today than ever before and writing calls for rules, flexible but generalized rules. The dictionary is a fundamental instrument for speakers.

- In your day, you were the first ombuds officer at UPF, now you have become the eleventh woman in the 300-year history of the RAE. Do you feel you are paving the way?

Women are paving the way little by little in society. Administrations, such as universities, are more permeable to the activity of women than big companies; in universities today there are more female than male students; there are not, however, as many female as male authorities. UPF had the first female rector in Catalonia, Rosa Virós. Progress will be made surely in all fields and to achieve this goal we have young female students.  

- You were dean of the Faculty of Translation and Interpretation at UPF in its early days, from 1993 to 1998. How has university teaching changed in your more than 20 years of dedication to the University?

This is a very difficult question to answer. We’ve all had good teachers, not all of them, because that’s impossible, not all doctors are good either. I think the difficulty now is that there is not sufficient proximity between teachers and students. I always remember a phrase with which I totally agree; a good teacher is someone who reveals himself, which means having an intellectual and a moral attitude towards the students at the same time.

- What do you think are the main challenges facing universities today?

Sorry, but I don’t know how I can answer that question, there must be so many! I retired from teaching more than eight years ago. I would dare to say that there has been a lot of progress in the quality of the research carried out at universities; quite possibly now work should be done to achieve excellence in teaching, especially in the first years of bachelor’s degrees.