Russian lookup dictionary support?

[Doitsu]

On my K3, it's not possible to look up words in the Russian dictionary by positioning the cursor before the word.
I'm wondering whether they fixed this problem in the latest Kindle Fire firmware. Please find attached 2 test files: a one-sentence Russian .mobi file generated with the latest version of Kindlegen and a Russian-English dictionary with English definitions for the first 4 words of the first (and only) sentence in the .mobi test file.
To test the dictionary lookup feature simply copy both files to your Kindle Fire, select the Russian-English dictionary as the default dictionary and then try to look up any of the first four words.
You should get a popup window with the English definition for Наш, банк, вчера or же.

[tomsem]

Unfortunately, Fire doesn't let you set a default dictionary.

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by tomsem

Unfortunately, Fire doesn't let you set a default dictionary.

On the K3, it's only necessary to define a default dictionary, if you have several dictionaries for the same language or if you want to read a .pdf file.
Can you copy both files and try to look up one of the first 4 words?

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by Doitsu

On the K3, it's only necessary to define a default dictionary, if you have several dictionaries for the same language or if you want to read a .pdf file.
Can you copy both files and try to look up one of the first 4 words?

Again, Fire comes with one dictionary, and you can't add any others AFAIK. Perhaps when it is updated to add other UI languages that will change.

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by tomsem

Again, Fire comes with one dictionary, and you can't add any others.

AFAIK, the Kindle offers 7 free monolingual dictionaries (en-US, en-UK, fr, it, de, es, pt-BR), some of which are downloaded on demand, and IIRC other Kindle Fire users reported that they successfully downloaded other English or French dictionaries.
So why don't you humor me and give it a shot. Just sideload my 2 very small test files to your Fire and report what happens if you try to look up the first 4 words.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by Doitsu

AFAIK, the Kindle offers 7 free monolingual dictionaries (en-US, en-UK, fr, it, de, es, pt-BR), some of which are downloaded on demand, and IIRC other Kindle Fire users reported that they successfully downloaded other English or French dictionaries.
So why don't you humor me and give it a shot. Just sideload my 2 very small test files to your Fire and report what happens if you try to look up the first 4 words.

You may be referring to Kindle or Kindle Touch, which have localized UI for those same languages. And unfortunately these do not support Russian dictionaries (I have tried it on my KT, KK, K2). Apparently many good people have tried unsuccessfully to get it to work. Some issue with mobi, I think it applies to all non Latin scripts.

Amazon is reportedly working on a Japan launch of Kindle, so perhaps as part of this they'll have an update that allows such things to work.

Again Kindle Fire does not have localized UI and there is no way to set a default dictionary. At least mine does not. Maybe the people who report success have rooted and given their Fire supernatural abilities.

And consider yourself humored, I did load the files and dictionary lookup just used the existing (English) dictionary. Cyrillic displays just fine, however.

[Doitsu]

Thanks for testing this, tomsem. I was considering getting a Fire, because I was hoping that they might have fixed the dictionary limitations along with KF8 support. Apparently this is not the case, which is a pity since Mobipocket Reader had none of these limitations.
Unfortunately, none of the Kindle homebrew developers seems to be into languages. I had hoped that by now someone would have hacked the dictionary lookup code or ported StarDict or another dictionary client for use with .mobi files.
But so far there's only Duokan whose StarDict client is extremely limited und buggy.

[Ceridan]

Thanks, Doitsu, your test dictionary actually works. And sadly this is the *only* Russian-whatever (English/Czech) dictionary I made work. How could I create such dictionary from a TXT or HTML or other format dictionary?

Thanks!