MOTIVATION FOR BUILDING A CUSTOM JAPANESE-ENGLISH DICTIONARY
The Japanese definition dictionary that is available for the Kobo Touch and newer models turned out to be of not much use to me. First reason is that my knowledge of Japanese is rather small and that I therefore need a translation dictionary. In an attempt to improve my situation, I added to the entries of the Japanese definition dictionary all matching entries from the
EDICT. Only after this I became aware that the KT handles queries to the Japanese dictionary rather inadequately and that the chances to get the appropriate definitions are rather little. For an attempted explanation and a proposed solution, see this
post. This solution requires a small change in the software and I hope we can see something on these lines in a future FW.
Even without changing the software, it is still possible to apply the basic idea of the proposed solution. There is, however, one server drawback without the change, and this is the high number of required chunks. Actually a decent Japanese dictionary requires more chunks than the format of the Kobo dictionary file format allows for. I therefore split the dictionary into two partial dictionaries.
CONTENT OF THE DICTIONARY
Part 1 (japdic01.zip) contains those entries of the EDICT that start with a Jouyou-Kanji.
Part 2 (japdic02.zip) contains
- all entries of the Edict that start with a Kanji beyond the Jouyou range
- all entries of the Edict that start with a Katakana character
- all entries of the whole Edict, except those starting with Katakana, but this time rearranged in a way that makes them available via Hiragana writing.
As you see, I did not especially treat those entries that have a mixture of Hiragana and Kanji AND start with a Hiragana.
INSTALLATION
In order to install this dictionary one has to sacrifice two dictionaries, other than the J-J and the F-F dictionaries (those two do not work properly). For the following explanation I presume that you sacrifice the Spain-Spain and the Dutch-Dutch dictionaries.
1) make sure that the Spain-Spain and the Dutch-Dutch dictionaries are properly installed on your reader.
2) delete the files dicthtml-es.zip and dicthtml-nl.zip in the directory {driveletter}:\.kobo\dict of your reader.
3) rename japdic01.zip to dicthtml-es.zip, and japdic02.zip to dicthtml-nl.zip. Copy both files into the directory {driveletter}:\.kobo\dict of your reader.
If the language of the epub/kepub is defined as Japanese and you point at a word, the original Kobo Japanese dictionary will pop-up, provided it is installed. In order to let japdic01 or Japdic02 pop-up set the book's language to Spain or Dutch (provided that book settings can be changed).
To make full use of the dictionary search function set the user language to Japanese, so that you can type in Japanese into the dictionary search field. (
Edit: With FW 2.3.1. you cannot any longer type into the search window of the Netherlands dictionary. I therefore recommend now to rename japdic02.zip to something other than dicthtml-nl.zip.)
Consisting of 64.103 and 15.250 html(gz)-files respectively, japdic01.zip and japdic02.zip are far more fragmented than the other dictionaries. Since I tested them only for a very short time I cannot say how they influence the overall performance or the power consumption of the reader.