The verbs “visualize”, “make visible” and “see”, all of them related to the sense of sight, are often used inappropriately as mere synonyms of “see”. Below are indications to delimit the most general uses of these verbs and thus write the news with more precision, according to Fundéu.
Source: Efe
1. “see” This is the most general verb and can be applied in many contexts for the perception of something through sight. It can even replace, depending on the context, the following verbs, although at the cost of losing the nuances that they provide.
2. “visualize”“Visualize” has the basic meaning of ‘make visible’, especially what is not seen directly, such as in the mind, through graphics or with some special device.
Therefore, phrases such as the following are appropriate: “The comet cannot be seen with the naked eye and it will be necessary to visualize it with a telescope” or “The interactive map allows visualizing the vote of each electoral table”. It is not, however, “The smoke was visualized from the coast” to express that it was seen with the naked eye.
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3. “make visible” It is similar to “visualize” and in a certain number of cases both options could be valid, but this verb implies more precisely the use of a device to artificially make visible what cannot be seen with the naked eye because it is hidden or is very small. For example: “Thanks to the microscope, the bacteria could be made visible.”
As the “Student’s Dictionary” shows, “make visible” can also be applied in general to what is hidden and is to be highlighted, above all a problem or a social group, as in “They launch a campaign to make the situation of refugee women visible”.
4. “Vision” “Vision” currently has a very specific value: ‘to examine technically or critically, in a work session, a cinematographic or television product, etc.’. For this reason, its use in “The President of the Government acknowledged that he had not seen ‘The Good Boss’” is not appropriate, since the point was simply that he had not seen this film.
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The FundéuRAE (www.fundeu.es), promoted by the EFE Agency and the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE), has as its main objective the proper use of Spanish in the media.
