Michael Sheldon's Stuff

Michael Sheldon (mike at mikeasoft dot com)

January 5, 2011

Free (as in GPL2) translation dictionaries for the Kindle
Mike @ 3:52 pm

Update: All dictionaries except for Welsh and Esperanto (which aren’t supported by kindlegen) have been updated to work with the Kindle 4.

I’ve had a Kindle for a little while and really like it, but one of the areas it seems to be somewhat lacking in is the availability of translation dictionaries, as such I knocked up a quick script to convert TinyLex dictionaries from the Apertium project into indexed Kindle dictionaries. The most useful of these is probably the German – English dictionaries as these are very complete (over 160,000 entries).

One thing that I find quite useful is setting the German -> English dictionary as my primary dictionary (instructions below) then opening the English -> German dictionary and searching for words (or vice versa), this way you can get an instant re-translation of any words suggested to you.

Installation

Kindle 3

  1. Download whichever dictionary you’re interested in from the list below.
  2. Transfer the file across to your Kindle as normal.
  3. Press the menu key on your Kindle.
  4. Select Settings.
  5. Press the menu key again.
  6. Select Change Primary Dictionary.
  7. Select your new dictionary from the list.

Kindle 4

  1. Download whichever dictionary you’re interested in from the list below.
  2. Transfer the file across to your Kindle as normal.

If this is the only dictionary you have for this language you’re now done. If you have multiple dictionaries continue:

  1. Press the menu key on your Kindle.
  2. Select Settings.
  3. Select edit next to Dictionaries on the second page.
  4. Select the language you wish to set the dictionary for.
  5. Select your new dictionary from the list.


Afrikaans

English -> Afrikaans 5165 entries
Afrikaans -> English 5195 entries

Esperanto

English -> Esperanto 12344 entries
Esperanto -> English 21316 entries

French

English -> French 6315 entries
French -> English 6304 entries

German (includes phrases)

English -> German 162004 entries
German -> English 166733 entries

Polish

English -> Polish 8107 entries
Polish -> English 9373 entries

Portuguese

English -> Portuguese 4759 entries
Portuguese -> English 4609 entries

Spanish

English -> Spanish 8488 entries
Spanish -> English 8769 entries

Welsh

English -> Welsh 6674 entries
Welsh -> English 8632 entries

Scripts

For those of you interested in the scripts used to generate these dictionaries, they can now be downloaded here: kindle-dict.tar.gz.

Most of the heavy lifting is done by the tab2opf.py script from StarDict-Lingea, the tinylex.sh script will do the necessary conversion to get a tinylex dictionary into a tab delimited format suitable for use by tab2opf.py, it’ll then run tab2opf.py and kindlegen on the output, providing you with a Mobipocket dictionary for use with the Kindle. See the README for more in depth instructions on how to make use of it.


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