Best Reader for Quick Translating

[Zetmolm]

Originally Posted by HarryT

It DOES work for looking words up in a book; I'm absolutely certain of that.

Does it also work when the word in the book is an inflected form?
E.g. Onyx / BeBook's dictionary does not find words that are not in 'dictionary form' (it will find 'sing' but not 'sung'). I'm told that PocketBook does. I'm curious about the Kindle.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Zetmolm

Does it also work when the word in the book is an inflected form?
E.g. Onyx / BeBook's dictionary does not find words that are not in 'dictionary form' (it will find 'sing' but not 'sung'). I'm told that PocketBook does. I'm curious about the Kindle.

That will depend on the individual dictionary. Some dictionaries are much better at looking up inflected forms than others. There's certainly nothing in the Mobi dictionary definition which prevents it from working - the default English and American English dictionaries supplied as standard with the Kindle work absolutely fine with inflected words.

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by Zetmolm

Does it also work when the word in the book is an inflected form?

Only if the dictionary author has included inflections in the source files. Dictionaries released by large publishers specializing in dictionaries almost always contain inflections.
However, dictionaries published by individuals and smaller publishing houses usually don't. To test this, you can download a sample file from Amazon.

Originally Posted by susan_cassidy

I assumed that "instant word lookup" meant the popup dictionary definitions, as normal.

That's exactly what I meant.

Originally Posted by HarryT

It DOES work for looking words up in a book; I'm absolutely certain of that.

That may be true for languages that use the Latin alphabet, but not for many other languages. At least not on my Kindle 3. Russian dictionary lookup, for example, didn't work.

Please find attached a test .mobi file with just one Russian sentence in it and a Russian-English test dictionary that contains only the definitions for the first four words of the sentence (Наш, банк, вчера and же).
I also attached the dictionary source files. (The ebook source files are embedded in the .mobi file.)

After I copied these test files to my K3, I selected the Russian-English dictionary as the default lookup dictionary and opened the Russian test ebook. However, when I moved the cursor before the first four words no popup definition was displayed. I then moved the cursor before the second word, clicked the four-way cursor key, pressed the right arrow and then the space bar to copy the word to the search window. When I selected the dictionary button from the entries at the bottom the word was found. This seems to indicate that the dictionary actually works, but the dictionary lookup doesn't, at least not on a Kindle 3.

It's possible that this issue was fixed in the K4 and Fire firmwares, but since I only have a K3, I cannot test this. I'd appreciate it, if K4 and KFire users could run the same test on their readers to find out if this issue has indeed been fixed.

[susan_cassidy]

Is the language encoding set properly on both the document and the dictionary you are using? That usually determines whether lookup will work.

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by susan_cassidy

Is the language encoding set properly on both the document and the dictionary you are using? That usually determines whether lookup will work.

Yes, it is. Feel free to have a look at the source files for both the dictionary and the ebook.