French translation dictionaries in PRS 350/650?
 

I'm considering purchase of either a PRS 350 or 650. Sony's product description says there are 10 translation dictionaries included. I would appreciate it if a current owner of either reader can confirm if French to English and English to French dictionaries are among them.

In additon, if anyone has any sources to purchase "livres en français" I would appreciate hearing of them. I know where to obtain "classic" literature, but contemporary fiction and non-fiction is proving difficult. Archambault.ca, a bookstore chain based in Quebec, has a decent collection of current french language ebooks for sale from a link on their site, but these ebooks apparently are not available for purchase outside of Quebec(or maybe Canada as well).

Merci en avance for your help!

Hi. I have had the Sony PRS-650 for two months now and am very happy with it. Yes it comes with 12 dictionaries including the French-English and English-French dictionaries. It is very easy to use too as it is always on after you have selected it. Just tap lightly on the word and a widow appears at the bottom of the page with the definition or translation.
It is not perfect in the sense that if you tap on the word "l'occasion" it will say "word not found" because there is an l and an apostrophe before the word. The way to get around this is to open the keyboard and delete the offending letter and apostrophe from the beginning of the word. The same goes for words like "s'occuper" etc.
To buy French ebooks try the following sites for a start.
www.fnac.com (80 000 titles and 750 comic books)
www.chapitre.com (3000 titles)

Yes. I bought my 650 in Belgium, and it has:

New Oxford American Dictionary (EN)
Oxford Dictionary of English (EN)
Oxford-hachette French Dictionary (EN-FR)
Oxford-hachette French Dictionary (FR-EN)
Collins English-German Dictionary (EN-DE)
Collins German-English Dictionary (DE-EN)
Oxford Spanish Dictionary (EN-ES)
Oxford Spanish Dictionary (ES-EN)
Collins English-Italian Dictionary (EN-IT)
Collins Italian-English Dictionary (IT-EN)
Van Dale Pocketwoordenboek Engels-Nederlands (EN-NE)
Van Dale Pocketwoordenboek Engels-Nederlands (NE-EN)

Clearly the set of dictionaries included in the device is localized (who else in the world would want a Dutch dictionary outside Belgium or the Netherlands), but the point is that the central language is English. In other words, if you were hoping to find a french dictionary, as opposed to a translation dictionary, you're SOL.

I'm personally delighted by the choice of dictionaries in my 650, as I'm primary a reader of English who knows French, Spanish and a bit of Dutch, but I'm clearly a minority here. The few other people I know who bought a 650 sorely miss a dictionary in their native tongue, and feel slightly shafted by Sony here. Their argument is that they have less for their money than english readers. In fact, I find it slightly odd that Sony doesn't include a native dictionary (or dictionaries in the case of multilangual countries such as Belgium) in readers sold in non-english speaking countries.

It is not localized - I would much rather have Portuguese - English than Dutch!

Thanks for the quick responses!

Polyglot(or anyone else), do you know if chapitre or fnac allow sales/downloads for U.S. based readers? The reason I ask is I tried to purchase an eBook on Archambault's site and when it came time to checkout, I was informed the purchase wasn't authorized for my country(U.S.).

Are you saying the set of dictionaries I have on my 650 is the same on all 650s sold the world over?

Yep! Maybe with the exception of the ones currently sold in japan.

Perhaps this would be of interest:Their conditions:Addendum

BTW - The Oxford-Hachette is the fourth edition © OUP and Hachette Livre 2007

Wow, I didn't realize, I thought Sony sold the device preloaded with different dictionaries depending on where it is sold. For someone in India or Zimbabwe, I guess Dutch dictionaries aren't all that useful.

As it stands, this choice of dictionaries suits me and a few other folks in Belgium to a T. For everybody else in the world, it must range from vaguely inadequate to borderline insulting. How silly of Sony...

Perhaps Sony's choice of dictionaries was intended to suit the majority of the countries in North and South America, and Western Europe, where maybe it expects most sales. Portuguese, for Portugal and Brazil, does seem to be a glaring omission, though. Perhaps Sony supplies a different set of dictionaries for models sold in Asia.

I would guess that Sony doesn't yet have the rights to put dictionaries for many markets on its ereaders, and in some cases the content of the dictionaries may have yet to be digitized. In many places publishers remain reluctant to publish e-books, of course, and I'm sure dictionary publishers are no exception. Once the e-book markets take off, the dictionaries will probably follow.

In any case, it's a positive sign that at least one line of ereaders now provides a good selection of translation dictionaries.

I wonder how much Oxford University Press gets paid for every Kindle and Sony Reader sold!

Not solely the OUP. For example, in the case of the Sony PRS-650's bilingual dictionaries, the French ones are jointly © OUP and Hachette Livre, the German and Italian ones are © HarperCollins, and the Dutch ones are © Van Dale Uitgevers.

Sorry to hijack the thread, but..... I'm planning to buy a PRS-650, (when they will eventually be on the market again :rolleyes:...) !

I would like to know if there is a possibility to find an english-portuguese (or french-portuguese) dictionary to this reader ! It seems that Sony didn't bother including portuguese in tthey readers -although I'm sure the Brazilian demand will certainly be very big for this kind of things :smack: !

...but... would there be a possibility to get an EXTERNAL dictionary and include it -like any book- in the reader ?

Just wondering/hoping...

J-P.

The Sony PRS-650's dictionaries are accessed by double-tapping on a word in an e-book, or via HOME -> Applications -> Dictionary. The dictionaries are not affected when the internal memory is formatted, so my guess is they are stored in read only memory. If you add a dictionary, just as you would any e-book, then it would not be possible to look up a word in the dictionary e-book by double-tapping on a word in another book. To look up a word in the other e-book, you would need to have both e-books open and then switch between them. It would be clumsy, but I suppose it would be workable. I don't know of any good bilingual Portuguese dictionaries, in e-book format.

If you are unsure where files are located, then you might find this helpful:

I've found opening the French - English application useful when an author has bandied about French expressions in an English language book.