MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - International Kindle & Alternate Dictionary

nictuku · 10-03-2010, 01:57 PM

Hi, I just wanted to report my partially successful experience adding a German-English dictionary to Kindle 3. The problems I was facing:

I could not find a proper German-English dictionary from Amazon. There are one or two, but they have very low user ratings and/or are not sold outside the US
The Oxford-Duden dictionary that Ea mentioned above is sold from mobipockets.com. I'm happy to pay a fair price for good books that I'll be using for many years, but I don't like the fact that their books are encumbered with DRM. I'm not sure if I would be able to de-DRM it, even though there are good information out there on how to. I avoid buying DRM-ed books as much as I can, specially when they won't work right away on my devices.
There are many good free (GPL) dictionaries out there. I wanted to try using those and see what happens.

So I wanted to use a German-English StarDict dictionary in the Kindle, using Linux. More details here, including a link to download the dictionary file ready to go in the kindle (it's a free, GPL content). There are many scattered posts in mobileread for instructions to doing this using Windows, but not many for Linux.

It worked, but it's not a good experience. First, this dictionary isn't good. Second, maybe because I set both the book and the dictionary to English, it won't lookup words that are capitalized in the middle of a sentence. But all nouns in German start with a capital letter so that's a big pain :-(. I believe this is by design, since dictionary lookups for capitalized letters in English don't make sense, so they can save a few CPU cycles to save on battery.

My next step is to change the metadata of the dictionary to indicate it's German (then do the same for the books I'm reading) and see what happens. Later I'll also try a better dictionary, maybe the one from dict.cc (free for non-commercial use, IIRC).

In the meantime, I'm hoping this may be useful to other people.

10-03-2010, 01:57 PM	#58
nictuku Junior Member Posts: 2 Karma: 10 Join Date: Oct 2010 Location: Zurich, Switzerland Device: Kindle 3	My experience using a German dictionary in Kindle 3 Hi, I just wanted to report my partially successful experience adding a German-English dictionary to Kindle 3. The problems I was facing: I could not find a proper German-English dictionary from Amazon. There are one or two, but they have very low user ratings and/or are not sold outside the US The Oxford-Duden dictionary that Ea mentioned above is sold from mobipockets.com. I'm happy to pay a fair price for good books that I'll be using for many years, but I don't like the fact that their books are encumbered with DRM. I'm not sure if I would be able to de-DRM it, even though there are good information out there on how to. I avoid buying DRM-ed books as much as I can, specially when they won't work right away on my devices. There are many good free (GPL) dictionaries out there. I wanted to try using those and see what happens. So I wanted to use a German-English StarDict dictionary in the Kindle, using Linux. More details here, including a link to download the dictionary file ready to go in the kindle (it's a free, GPL content). There are many scattered posts in mobileread for instructions to doing this using Windows, but not many for Linux. It worked, but it's not a good experience. First, this dictionary isn't good. Second, maybe because I set both the book and the dictionary to English, it won't lookup words that are capitalized in the middle of a sentence. But all nouns in German start with a capital letter so that's a big pain :-(. I believe this is by design, since dictionary lookups for capitalized letters in English don't make sense, so they can save a few CPU cycles to save on battery. My next step is to change the metadata of the dictionary to indicate it's German (then do the same for the books I'm reading) and see what happens. Later I'll also try a better dictionary, maybe the one from dict.cc (free for non-commercial use, IIRC). In the meantime, I'm hoping this may be useful to other people. Last edited by nictuku; 10-03-2010 at 02:03 PM.