Quote:
Originally Posted by DuckieTigger
Was waiting a little bit for a reply 'til something bigger showed up (like your anouncement of something happening soon  ). I did not mean automatic translation more like a menu option or a button when you look up in dictionary - if explanation does not make sence, hit the "translate this from" and you select the language next, and see the translation. Even though I think the device should be able to look up e.g. 5 translation dictionaries at once and simultanously show what it translates to each. You undererestimate how little work it takes to look up a word in a dictionary. Only because the e-ink appears to react slow, does not mean that the lookup of the word probably takes less time than a full refresh of the screen. |
I was not talking about real-time translation, I was just trying to highlight the fact that if the reader asks the dictionary for word X that appears in many dictionary with the same spelling, it might be troublesome to detect which definition should be displayed (i.e., recognizing the right dictionary to be used). An alternative might be using some language tags inside the ebook, but that's a different story and it is quite difficult to convince people who write those books to actually use your own tags... As you suggest, maybe the user could switch between different dictionaries manually.
Moreover a modern language dictionary index (600K words) has ~10 MB size with a standard record format like word (1 byte/char) + separator (1 byte) + offset (4 bytes) + size (4 bytes), where offset and size refer to the actual dictionary file. Perhaps having 5 dictionaries simultaneously loaded in RAM is doable, but certainly not many more.