Dictionary lookup in iBooks 1.1: "Dictionary not available for this language"

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by jplumey

Oh ok. Converting an ePub to ePub wasn't intuitive to me but I'll give it a shot.

It definitely works. I've reconverted a load of my ePub books with Calibre 0.7.7 and the dictionary now works fine.

[guess32]

[Quote

[HarryT]

Thank you very much.

[Sinthor]

Hmmmmm, this works for me on MOST of my ebooks.....most. I bought the new Honor Harrington book from Baen online though and IT doesn't work. Couldn't make terminal instructions for Mac work, either.

[netman49]

Hi all,

The language setting works fine when the interface setting in Calibre is set to English, because Calibre uses that interface setting to define the language in the ePub e-Book you create.

But for all of us in other countries who have another interface setting then English it doesn't work.

The best solution (after my opinion is that Kovid adds a meta-data field "language" to the meta-data settings of every book in the Calibre library.
We can then set the language per e-Book, which is then used for the language setting in the ePub version.

When Apple issues dictionaries in other languages in the iBooks App it all goes fine, because the language is then recognized.

Hope Kovid reads this

[JSWolf]

Well, iBooks 1.1.2 fixes this dictionary bug.

[kjk]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Well, iBooks 1.1.2 fixes this dictionary bug.

I noticed it works now with books I hadn't re-run thru Calibre-can you tell what they've done to fix the issue? Just allowed the setting to be undefined, and still give the english dictionary?

[ctop]

Hi there,

The dictionary functionality in iBooks is a keypoint to me, so I went ahead and did some further investigation.
Since I have a jailbroken iPad, I poked around in the file system and found six dictionaries under /Library/Dictionaries, the same six dictionaries that are bundled in SnowLeopard and available in the Dictionary application there.

Three of the dictionaries are for English; the other three are Japanese. The English ones are:

Apple Dictionary
New Oxford American Dictionary
Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus

and the Japanese ones are:

Shogakukan Daijisen
Shogakukan Progressive English-Japanese Japanese-English Dictionary
Shogakukan Ruigo Reikai Jiten

So next, I made a test with a Japanese book from Project Gutenberg (I verified that it has the correct language setting in the ePub file ('ja') and did not use Calibre to transfer it, since apparently Calibre 7.10 does reset the language code to 'en', which makes it unusable in this case). And indeed, I can now look up Japanese definitions in the dictionary. In fact, the Gutenberg blurb at the beginning of the file, which is in English, makes also use of the English dictionaries.

Unfortunately, in both cases, the dictionaries used are monolingual dictionaries, that is English to English or Japanese to Japanese, which is not ideal for beginners of the language, who would rather have a dictionary that explains foreign words in their own language. It is to be hoped that future versions of iBook allow more flexible settings for the dictionaries, including the installation of additional dictionaries.

As it happens, I poked around in the iBooks application itself and found a file called
"BKDictionaryManager_LanguageToOrder.plist". As the name suggest, this file lists a list dictionaries in their order of preference for the languages "ja" and "en". A change to this file (adding the English-Japanese dictionary to the "en" list and moving the Japanese-English dictionary in the first position) did indeed cause iBooks to show the bilingual dictionaries first, so this change is possible and indeed straightforward on jailbroken devices. It might even be possible to make additional dictionaries for other languages available in this way. I will try if dictionaries for Mac OS can simply be copied over and used on the iPad next time I have time.

Ctop

[kjk]

Very cool, ctop, thanks for checking that out!

[poohbear_nc]

Can one add a dictionary to the /Library/Dictionaries list in a jail broken iPad?

[neous]

Originally Posted by foghat

1. You need to rename the extension on your book from .epub to .zip
2. You can then open the file using winzip (or whatever).
3. Look for a file with a .opf extension.
4. Open this file in notepad and look for the tag name <dc:language>
5. Change the value between these tags to en. so should look like: <dc:language>en</dc:language>
6. save the .opf file and make sure the zip library gets updated with the updated file.
7. change the extension back to .epub
8. Delete the existing book from itunes and sync.
9. Add the changed file to itunes and sync.

should be good now.

Thank you

[netman49]

Originally Posted by ctop

Hi there,

The dictionary functionality in iBooks is a keypoint to me, so I went ahead and did some further investigation.
Since I have a jailbroken iPad, I poked around in the file system and found six dictionaries under /Library/Dictionaries, the same six dictionaries that are bundled in SnowLeopard and available in the Dictionary application there.

Three of the dictionaries are for English; the other three are Japanese. The English ones are:

Apple Dictionary
New Oxford American Dictionary
Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus

and the Japanese ones are:

Shogakukan Daijisen
Shogakukan Progressive English-Japanese Japanese-English Dictionary
Shogakukan Ruigo Reikai Jiten

So next, I made a test with a Japanese book from Project Gutenberg (I verified that it has the correct language setting in the ePub file ('ja') and did not use Calibre to transfer it, since apparently Calibre 7.10 does reset the language code to 'en', which makes it unusable in this case). And indeed, I can now look up Japanese definitions in the dictionary. In fact, the Gutenberg blurb at the beginning of the file, which is in English, makes also use of the English dictionaries.

Unfortunately, in both cases, the dictionaries used are monolingual dictionaries, that is English to English or Japanese to Japanese, which is not ideal for beginners of the language, who would rather have a dictionary that explains foreign words in their own language. It is to be hoped that future versions of iBook allow more flexible settings for the dictionaries, including the installation of additional dictionaries.

As it happens, I poked around in the iBooks application itself and found a file called
"BKDictionaryManager_LanguageToOrder.plist". As the name suggest, this file lists a list dictionaries in their order of preference for the languages "ja" and "en". A change to this file (adding the English-Japanese dictionary to the "en" list and moving the Japanese-English dictionary in the first position) did indeed cause iBooks to show the bilingual dictionaries first, so this change is possible and indeed straightforward on jailbroken devices. It might even be possible to make additional dictionaries for other languages available in this way. I will try if dictionaries for Mac OS can simply be copied over and used on the iPad next time I have time.

Ctop

Hi Ctop,
Have you come any furthur with your investigations?