Troubleshooting kindle vocabulary building issue (not showing definitions)

[mendesitba]

Greetings!
I'm having some problem with the kindle vocabulary building, maybe someone of you could help me.
Basically, the issue is that some words saved in the vocabulary building do not have any definition (although when I had selected the same word on the document, the definition was there).

It does not happen with all documents, only some of them. I tried to identify some pattern and that is what I noticed: For instance, in a bilingual book bought at amazon.com only Portuguese words work while English words do not have the definition on vocabulary building (and again, definition of these words appear automatically when I was reading the book), the same happebs on bilingual "personal documents" sent by email. But on this case, the English words definitions do not appear automatically when I'm reading the document (I have to change the dictionary to English). On the other hand, on English only books or personal documents, the words saved to vocabulary building works well, they show the dictionary definition.

Someone know how to fix it? I would like all my words, or at least non-Portuguese ones, to show definitions when I'm using vocabulary building.

Device: Kindle Paperwhite

[tomsem]

I think what may be happening is that the bilingual personal documents are getting tagged as 'PT' (portuguese), and Vocabulary Builder is storing all the looked-up words with that language code. Since the English words (tagged as PT) don't appear in the portuguese dictionary, lookup fails. Monolingual books don't have this issue, at least if they have the correct language tag applied in the first place.

Obviously if you had to switch dictionaries to look up a word, it would be nice if Vocabulary Builder would record the word with the language code of the dictionary where lookup was successful. Then it could use the same dictionary for subsequent lookups. But it appears it is not doing that.

In theory language tags can be applied not just to entire documents, but to individual words, paragraphs, etc. in the source file (at least HTML source files). But again I don't know if Kindle pays attention at that level of granularity. I've been meaning to experiment to find out. But perhaps someone here has already done that and can tell us.

[mendesitba]

Originally Posted by tomsem

In theory language tags can be applied not just to entire documents, but to individual words, paragraphs, etc. in the source file (at least HTML source files). But again I don't know if Kindle pays attention at that level of granularity. I've been meaning to experiment to find out. But perhaps someone here has already done that and can tell us.

Tomsem, thanks for the detailed answer! It helped me to understand what is happening here. It seems it won't be possible to fix the problem with Vocabulary Builder but I may try some alternative method related to "personal documents" settings.

The problem described in the first post is mainly affecting my "personal documents" feeds/rss generated by calibre and sent to my kindle automatically by this app. So, I would like to ask if you, or someone else, know a way of editing the language tags of each RSS Source of my personal documents. This is the first alternative method I would like to try in order to fix this problem.

I attached a printscreen of the "advanced settings" of the "feed/rss" that Calibre create for me daily. In this printscreen, I have French, English, Spanish and Portuguese sources. Maybe there is a way of changing the language tags of each one them through this "advanced settings" options. That's what I would like to try first.





If this is not possible, I may created four "personal documents" feed, one for each language. But even this method I don't know how to change the whole document language tag for each one of them. Since my Calibre is in Portuguese, I suppose that each "personal document" feed will be created with Portuguese language tag. Any idea how to change it?

Edit: Since the jpeg is not showing above, here is the link of the file => https://www.dropbox.com/sc/c6kmrnvuh...2eQtHPAC8fleLa

[eschwartz]

Language is one of the metadata tags you can apply to books in calibre. If you change that tag, it will be reflected when you re-send the book to your device.

If you need more granular control over the language, calibre includes an ebook editor, which you can use to style specific tags with language attributes.

I am pretty sure the Kindle can recognize the granularity, at least with the dictionary, so there should be no problem here too.

[mendesitba]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Language is one of the metadata tags you can apply to books in calibre. If you change that tag, it will be reflected when you re-send the book to your device.

If you need more granular control over the language, calibre includes an ebook editor, which you can use to style specific tags with language attributes.

I am pretty sure the Kindle can recognize the granularity, at least with the dictionary, so there should be no problem here too.

Thanks for the link with Calibre Manual, it's really useful and I saved it here on my browse favorites! Unfortunately, I cannot find what I'm looking for (I'll try to explain it more clearly below) in this manual. I'll wait for a while to see if someone can help me in this post. If not, I will open a new post in the proper forum (Calibre forum).

Since it wont be possible to change Vocabulary Builder behavior, I'll try to change the "personal document" in order for it to work properly with Vocabulary Builder. I have some ideas in mind in order to make this happen, but I don't know how to put them in practice. I will list below, in order of preference, what I'm thinking to do in order to fix this problem.

1. First Option: Changing the "language tab" of each source of my RSS/Feed automatically created and sent to my Kindle by Calibre. Explaining: Each day I receive one Personal Doc from Calibre including the last news from sources in four languages (for instance, Le Monde => French; Agência Brasileira de Comunicação => Portuguese; ESGlobal => Spanish; Project Syndicate => English). The problem is that Calibre, when he create this document and send it automatically to my Kindle e-mail, that document (.mobi) is created as a Portuguese document, making me unable to use Vocabulary Builder with words in different languages (as Tomsem has explained). So, to fix this problem, I would like to know if there is a way of editing the advanced settings of the "news recipe" (as Calibre name it) in order to each source of the recipe has the correct language tab associated to it. Here is how "advanced settings" of the "recipe" looks like.

2. Second Option: If the above option isn't possible to do, I may set Calibre to create 4 different "Feed/RSS Personal Documents", one for each language. My doubt in this case is how to make Calibe automatically set the correct language for each document. When editing the "news recipe" that I have created in Calibre, I cannot find any option to change the to-be-created "news recipe/personal document" language.
It is not an alternative to change it manually, since I would have to do it in 4 different documents and in a daily basis. And it would simply dis-characterize this great Calibre feature that allow us to receive automatically and daily on our Kindle every RSS we want to.

[eschwartz]

Add in "language = en" to the recipe class. See various examples HERE.

Side note: you can just copy-paste the code from the recipe editor, directly into your post. Use the [CODE][/CODE] tags (done through the magic of [NOPARSE][/NOPARSE] -- recursively ) to make it respect spacing and stuff.

But yeah, any further discussion can be addressed to the Recipes subforum and resident specialists.