or the past four decades, Sun Yizhen, an emeritus Spanish professor of Shanghai International Studies University (SISU), has been focusing on one thing: compiling dictionaries.

“What I do is to tell Chinese stories well through dictionaries, build a framework for China’s Spanish dictionaries career, and promote exchanges between China and Spanish-speaking countries,” he said.

The 88-year-old man had finished six dictionaries and a grammar reference on Spanish, which totaled over 20 million words. He wrote the first drafts, revised and finalized the manuscripts of every work.

Sun’s interest in dictionaries goes back to 1958 when he was a third-year Spanish student at Beijing Foreign Studies University, helping compile China’s first Diccionario Español-Chino (Spanish-Chinese Dictionary) since 1949.

Sun then was appointed to compile his first dictionary Diccionario Manual Español-Chino  (Concise Spanish-Chinese Dictionary) when teaching in SISU in 1976. The dictionary introduces four million characters and more than 43,000 headwords, covering vocabulary for common nouns and terms, as well as phrases and idioms. The dictionary was awarded the third prize of the Shanghai Philosophy and Social Science Outstanding Achievement Award in 1986.

Sun recalled that the compilation work was indispensable for the country’s economic growth and education. “I was trying to turn what I know about the Spanish into an available reference book, though my main work was teaching at that time.”

After retirement in 1988 from SISU, he still spent eight hours a day on the dictionary. Sun organized a dictionary compilation team with more than 20 Spanish experts nationwide.

The team took over 10 years to write Nuevo Era Gran Diccionario Español-Chino (New Era Spanish-Chinese Dictionary) which came out in 2008. The dictionary is known as China’s largest-scale of compiling Spanish-Chinese bilingual dictionary with 9.5 million words, 120,000 entries and 30,000 idioms. Its first 5,000 copies had sold out in one year and now has been reprinted three times. The dictionary got the second place of the Shanghai Philosophy and Social Science Outstanding Achievement Award in 2011.

With these practices, the former professor gradually formed his own concept of compilation: the interpretation should be based on contrast words, and the Chinese characteristic vocabulary, such as heavenly stem, the twenty-four solar terms and so on, need to be directly translated from Chinese into Spanish, not depending on English translation.

Like Sun, the first batch of his colleagues from SISU of compilation are all gray-haired. Fortunately, he has been expanding the Spanish language dictionary team which now consists of three generations —old, middle-aged and young scholars. "Our team is a big family, and everyone has a common dream which is to compile a good dictionary."

Sun won the 4^th Lexicographical Career Lifetime Achievement Award with other 11 dictionary experts across the country in 2018. Only 26 scholars won the honor before him.

“The honor should not only belong to me, but belong to the hard-working Spanish Department of SISU. The relaxed academic atmosphere of SISU also helped a lot," he said at the reward.

Sun is compiling the five-million-word Nuevo Era Gran Diccionario Chino-Español (New Era Chinese-Spanish Dictionary). “I will devote my short life to China's Spanish dictionary career,” him said.